It's Only February 2007...

2/22 AP story:

The rival presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record) traded accusations of nasty politics Wednesday over Hollywood donor David Geffen, who once backed Bill Clinton but now supports his wife's top rival.

The Clinton campaign demanded that Obama denounce comments made by the DreamWorks movie studio founder, who told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in Wednesday's editions that while "everybody in politics lies," the former president and his wife "do it with such ease, it's troubling." The Clinton camp also called on Obama to give back Geffen's $2,300 contribution.

Campaigning in Iowa, Obama refused."It's not clear to me why I'd be apologizing for someone else's remark," the Illinois senator said.

"Would You Vote For a (fill in the blank) for President?"

Somewhat interesting chart at Political Arithmetik comparing responses to poll questions over the years regarding our willingness to vote for a Baptist, Catholic, Jew, Mormon, Woman, Black, Atheist, or Homosexual for President.

I say only somewhat interesting because abstract questions of this nature melt away in the face of an actual candidate seeking your vote. Even when polled on a specific person, perceptions can change dramatically based on time and events. My favorite example of this were the polls on Ronald Reagan's age. In the mid-70s, polls showed significant numbers of people thought he was too old to be President. By the 1980 campaign, when he was the (even-older) GOP frontrunner, those numbers declined, and they had declined even further by his 1984 re-election campaign, which he won in a landslide at the age of 73.

But never mind the above categories. There are really only two kinds of candidates: those who believe their candidacy and agenda are circumscribed by static poll results, and those who seek to change those polls through their rhetoric and bold action.

Need a New Finger?

People that know me know why I have a, uh, personal interest in stories about people cutting off bits of their fingers. Now comes this AP story (wish I'd known about the pig bladder extract trick):

Science finds new ways to regrow fingers

Researchers are trying to find ways to regrow fingers — and someday, even limbs — with tricks that sound like magic spells from a Harry Potter novel.

There's the guy who sliced off a fingertip but grew it back, after he treated the wound with an extract of pig bladder. And the scientists who grow extra arms on salamanders. And the laboratory mice with the eerie ability to heal themselves.

This summer, scientists are planning to see whether the powdered pig extract can help injured soldiers regrow parts of their fingers. And a large federally funded project is trying to unlock the secrets of how some animals regrow body parts so well, with hopes of applying the the lessons to humans.

The implications for regrowing fingers go beyond the cosmetic. People who are missing all or most of their fingers, as from an explosion or a fire, often can't pick things up, brush their teeth or button a button. If they could grow even a small stub, it could make a huge difference in their lives. And the lessons learned from studying regrowth of fingers and limbs could aid the larger field of regenerative medicine, perhaps someday helping people replace damaged parts of their hearts and spinal cords, and heal wounds and burns with new skin instead of scar.

But that's in the future. For now, consider the situation of Lee Spievack, a hobby-store salesman in Cincinnati, as he regarded his severed right middle finger one evening in August 2005. He had been helping a customer with an engine on a model airplane behind the shop. He knew the motor was risky because it required somebody to turn the prop backwards to make it run the right way. I pointed to it," Spievack recalled the other day, "and said, 'You need to get rid of this engine, it's too dangerous.' And I put my finger through the prop." He'd misjudged the distance to the spinning plastic prop. It sliced off his fingertip, leaving just a bit of the nail bed. The missing piece, three-eighths of an inch long, was never found.

Here I must add a big thanks to Brian Herlihy, wherever you are. Dude saved my future as a guitar player.

If Spievack, now 68, had been a toddler, things might have been different. Up to about age 2, people can consistently regrow fingertips, says Dr. Stephen Badylak, a regeneration expert at the University of Pittsburgh. But that's rare in adults, he said.

Spievack, however, did have a major advantage — a brother, Alan, a former Harvard surgeon who'd founded a company called ACell Inc., that makes an extract of pig bladder for promoting healing and tissue regeneration. It helps horses regrow ligaments, for example, and the federal government has given clearance to market it for use in people. Similar formulations have been used in many people
to do things like treat ulcers and other wounds and help make cartilage.

The summer before Lee Spievack's accident, Dr. Alan Spievack had used it on a neighbor who'd cut his fingertip off on a tablesaw. The man's fingertip grew back over four to six weeks, Alan Spievack said.

Lee Spievack took his brother's advice to forget about a skin graft and try the pig powder. Soon a shipment of the stuff arrived and Lee Spievack started applying it every two days. Within four weeks his finger had regained its original length, he says, and in four months "it looked like my normal finger." Spievack said it's a little hard, as if calloused, and there's a slight scar on the end. The nail continues to grow at twice the speed of his other nails. "All my fingers in this cold weather have cracked except that one," he said. All in all, he said, "I'm quite impressed."

As am I.

The article goes on to talk about how they are trying some experimental treatments along these lines on soldiers who have injured their fingers. Let's hope they have some success.

"How Obama Learned To Be A Natural"

That's the title of an interesting article on Obama from Salon that recounts his losing congressional race in 2000, and how he rebounded from this defeat by transforming his political style and rhetoric. The gist:

As a correspondent for the Chicago Reader, I covered Obama's 2000 campaign
to unseat Bobby Rush, the ex-Black Panther who's been a Democratic congressman
from Chicago's South Side since 1993. It's the only election Obama has ever
lost. As even one of his admirers put it, "He was a stiff." You think John Kerry
looked wooden and condescending on the campaign trail? You should have seen this
kid Obama. He was the elitist Ivy League Democrat to top them all. Only after
losing that race, in humiliating fashion, did he develop the voice, the style,
the track record and the agenda that have made him a celebrity senator, and a
Next President.

Independent Record Labels Sign MySpace Deal

More interesting -- and welcome -- news on the music industry front, from a Jan. 21 Reuters story:

Merlin, the new agency representing the world's independent music sector, has agreed a deal with digital music company Snocap which will allow its labels' music to be sold from Web sites such as MySpace. The group announced the deal at the annual MidemNet music conference in France, saying it would allow thousands of independent labels across the world to sell digital downloads of their music from their MySpace pages and other sites.

Merlin was launched on Saturday to secure licensing deals with emerging media such as MySpace and YouTube. The group said it would act as the "fifth major" in the world with a view to rectifying the "poor cousin" status of deals previously offered to independent labels. Snocap, founded by Napster creator Sean Fanning, will use its retail initiative called Mystore which enables music to be downloaded from Web sites. The Mystore and MySpace tie up will launch in the "near future".

The downloads will be sold in the MP3 format, meaning they can be played on any portable music player including the iPod. Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes can only be used with an iPod while music from such popular services as Napster and Rhapsody cannot be played on the mass-selling device.

The agreement, the first of its kind, will be offered to all members of Merlin. "This immediately opens up what is currently the most popular Web site in the world to the independent labels," Merlin Chief Executive Charles Caldas told Reuters. MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told Reuters last year that the group hoped to be one of the biggest digital music stores available. The hugely popular social networking site Myspace is owned by News Corp.

The independent record label sector makes up for 30 percent of the music sold worldwide, with the rest from the four majors -- Vivendi's Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI Group and Warner Music Group.

Download-Only Song Hits Top 40 in UK

Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog notes a BBC story that the British band Koopa "could become the first unsigned group to land a UK top 40 hit thanks to new chart rules. Chart rules were changed at the start of January to count all digital single sales, even if there is no CD version."

Two other interesting points from the BBC article:

• These guys are no overnight sensation. They've been together for seven years, and they've played about 500 gigs in the past 3 years. No doubt some MySpace-only band without the chops to play live, or whose music couldn't be reproduced live, will hit the charts soon (there are bands that got signed to a label after conquering MySpace, but Koopa has done it without label help). But Koopa's success shows how critical building a live following can be. (By the way, I've got nothing against music that can't be played live. After all, that's one reason the Beatles quit the road, so they could make something like Sgt. Pepper.)

• Just as the band is making do without a label, its fans are probably bypassing online stores and buying the song with their cell phones, paying £1.50 to send a text message and receive a code to download the song on a computer. "The average 16-year-old doesn't have a credit card but they've got a mobile phone," the manager explains.

Will Saudis Ban the Letter ‘X'?

Apparently not a joke, according to an article in the New York Sun:

The letter "X" soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the
mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

The new development came with the issuing of another mind-bending fatwa, or
religious edict, by the infamous Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice — the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on
all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The
commission's damning of the letter "X" came in response to a Ministry of Trade
query about whether it should grant trademark protection to a Saudi businessman
for a new service carrying the English name "Explorer."

"No! Nein! Nyet!" was the commission's categorical answer.

(Courtesy of Christianity Today's Weblog.)

Nice Tune

"Put Your Records On" - yeah, that's the name of the tune, by Corinne Bailey Rae. I heard 15 seconds of her on NPR and then found an out-of-sync video at YouTube. Silly lyrics but the song is quite nice.

Mormonism and Christianity

I found an interesting essay by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus at First Things from several years ago on the question "Is Mormonism Christian?"

As usual, Neuhaus sets the right tone:

We are obliged to respect human dignity across the board, and to affirm common discernments of the truth wherever we find them. Where we disagree we should try to put the best possible construction on the position of the other, while never trimming the truth. That will become more important as Mormons become more of a presence, both in this country and the world.

He then explores the history and structure of Mormonism, and the predictions and prospects for its growth worldwide, before grappling with the question itself:

The question as asked by Mormons is turned around: are non–Mormons who claim to be Christians in fact so? The emphatic and repeated answer of the Mormon scriptures and the official teaching of the LDS is that [Catholics and Protestants] are not. We are members of "the great and abominable church" that was built by frauds and impostors after the death of the first apostles. The true church and true Christianity simply went out of existence, except for its American Indian interlude, until it was rediscovered and reestablished by Joseph Smith in upstate New York, and its claims will be vindicated when Jesus returns, sooner rather than later, at a prophetically specified intersection in Jackson County, Missouri.

Nauhaus is not being snarky; Mormons believe that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, and that Jesus will return there. (I'll have you know I was born in Jackson County... hmmmm...)

And here we come to the serious disagreement over the nature of God and man:

Mormonism claims that God is an exalted man, not different in kind as Creator is different in kind from creature. The Mormon claim is, "What God was, we are. What God is, we will become." Related to this is the teaching that the world was not created ex nihilo but organized into its present form, and that the trespass in the Garden of Eden, far from being the source of original sin, was a step toward becoming what God is. Further, Mormonism teaches that there is a plurality of gods. Mormons dislike the term "polytheism," preferring "henotheism," meaning that there is a head God who is worshiped as supreme. If Christian doctrine is summarized in, for instance, the Apostles’ Creed as understood by historic Christianity, official LDS teaching adds to the creed, deviates from it, or starkly opposes it almost article by article.... Christians in dialogue with Islam understand it to be an interreligious, not an ecumenical, dialogue. Ecumenical dialogue is dialogue between Christians. Dialogue with Mormons who represent official LDS teaching is interreligious dialogue.

With Mitt Romney filing his presidential exploratory papers today, we'll be hearing more about his Mormon faith, and Neuhaus's piece provides interesting background.

But when it comes to politics, I'm not too concerned that Romney is a member of the LDS.

What I am still concerned about is his very recent conversion on abortion and gay marriage. See this post for some links on this.

"Saddam Film Terrible"

Carol Iannone's comments over at NRO's PhiBetaCons blog on the way Saddam's execution was conducted sums up my feelings exactly:

Despite what has been posted here on various arguments for the morality of executing Saddam, I am afraid that whatever value his death might have had for the new Iraq will be dissipated by the awful film of his last moments. There is good reason that we no longer have public hangings and executions. Of course they have to be witnessed, and maybe this one had to have some official footage in order to assure people that it had taken place, but what I have seen of the evidently unofficial film (and I guess no precautions were taken to insure against that) is an absolute disgrace, a violation of the whole procedure, removing it from the level of higher justice and putting it on the level of tribal vengeance.

The film could even support the argument against capital punishment. In a film of this low level, looking like something that could have been done in the depths of the gulag, we do not see the cruel dictator who committed crimes against against humanity being executed honorably and in a dignified way—in a manner of death more humane than he inflicted on others—in order to serve justice, but a poor helpless human being having his God-given life taken away by ordinary men who have somehow been given power over him, some of whom taunted him in his last moments. And his executioners being hooded did not carry the idea that they were personifications of abstract justice, but suggested in that context the primitive, hooded, faceless murderousness of the Middle East that we often see in parades and funerals. Terrible, terrible, terrible, and another sign that Iraq is nowhere on the rule of law and that we have been utter fools to think that this society even understands the meaning of those words at this point. And the execution being done around the time of a Sunni holiday, that makes it even more of a transgression and an embarrassment.

Wheat and Weeds has a good post that discusses how to apply the Catholic Church's teaching on the death penalty to someone like Saddam. But it seems to me that IF you are going to execute a tyrant, I'm afraid we've just seen an example of how not to do it.

"Hey, Sandy Berger..."

... boxers or briefs?"

I'm thinking boxers, 'cause they're roomier.

Ideal for transporting briefs.

Sickening

[verbatim AFP story]

India losing 7,000 unborn girls daily to selective abortion
Tue Dec 12, 2:34 PM ET

India is losing almost 7,000 girls daily because of the traditional preference for sons which cause many people to abort female foetuses, the UNICEF said.

"India is one of the few countries worldwide with an adverse child sex ratio in favor of boys," the United Nations children's agency said in its annual "State of the World's Children 2007" report. "Nationwide, 7000 fewer girls than expected are born each day, largely due to sex determination," the report said.

A study by British medical journal "The Lancet" said this year that India may have lost 10 million unborn girls in the past 20 years, but Indian experts say the figure is not more than five million.

Under Indian law, tests to find out the gender of an unborn baby are illegal if not done for medical reasons, but the practice continues in what activists say is a flourishing multi-million-dollar business.

Northern Punjab state has one of the worst sex ratios in the country, with 798 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six.

The national average is 927 -- still well below the worldwide average of 1,050 female babies. UNICEF said there were fewer than 800 girls per 1000 boys in 14 districts of Punjab and neighbouring Haryana, both of which are prosperous state.

Girls in India are often considered a liability, as parents have to put away large sums of money for dowries at the time of their marriage. Many grooms demand dowry well beyond the means of the families of their spouse. Centuries of tradition also demand that couples produce at least one male child to carry on the family name.

The UN agency said the practice was more rampant in affluent areas, because they provided better access to medical techniques to determine the gender of the foetus. Girls continued to be neglected after birth because of a preference for sons, UNICEF said. "After birth, son-preference continues to persist, leading to the neglect of girls and their lack of access to nutrition, health and maternal care in the critical early years," the report said.

Mitt Romney's Problems

Here is a useful piece by National Review Online's Byron York summarizing how Mitt Romney's past positions are haunting his current presidential run.

Last week Romney had a Q&A session with NRO, conducted by friendly interviewer Kathryn Jean Lopez, covering this same turf.

Put me down as highly suspicious of his timing.

"Goreishly Warm"

My attempt at some new slang, as in "In the Washington, D.C. area it has been Goreishly warm in November and December. Makes you wonder if there's something to all that Global Warming stuff...

...then again, August was so cool it was practically Hillaryesque."

Miss Dewey? I Don't

Microsoft has debuted its new search engine, Miss Dewey. It seems that MSN.com is losing out so badly to Google that they have decided to create this new gimmicky thing. Miss Dewey is a live-action actress who responds to whatever you type in the search box. The actress that plays Miss Dewey is certainly attractive, and her sometimes naughty reactions will attract her 15 minutes of fame (after all, I'm writing about her...), but the whole concept is fundamentally flawed.

Dewey's responses are a bunch of pre-filmed Flash video clips (the whole thing is wrapped in Flash, which is why it takes so long to load). After typing something in, much clunkiness ensues, as the parser analyzes your text and searches its database of clips for something relevant or at least supposedly humorous. Only after the chosen clip plays do your actual search results appear.

It feels so 1993, back in the day when video game makers were talking about "interactive movies." None of that stuff worked, in either a critical or popular sense. (By contrast, "interactive drama" is a field still alive and growing).

The root of the problem: you cannot interact with static media. Or, as my guru Chris Crawford puts it, "You can only interact with process, not data."

I'm using "interactivity" here as a formal term of art, not in the informal, colloquial sense. Just because some web page has a button that says "click here" does not mean that actual interactivity is taking place. Too often, something like Miss Dewey promises interactivity, but when it fails to deliver, we get bored and never come back.

It's all about expectations. When you click on your TV, you don't expect interactivity, so you don't experience this kind of frustration (you do of course experience all the other frustrations associated with the infernal Tube).

I hope to write more soon about the emerging medium of computer-based interactive drama, how this field differs from video games, and how interactive drama may provide authors a new way to explore the unchanging human condition in a form that has particular appeal to the postmodern person.

Listen to Robbie George

Here's an excellent Christianity Today interview with Robert P. George, a Princeton professor, on the roots of our cultural problems. George discusses his book "The Clash of Orthodoxies," the divide between popular and elite opinion, the relationship of faith and reason, and the growing alliance between Evangelicals and Catholics.

Robbie George is a leading advocate for applying the Church's Natural Law tradition to moral questions. And, I'll have you know, he's also a terrific bluegrass musician.

What Does It Mean to be a "Centrist" Today in the U.S.?

Well, I guess it means you live just southwest of St. Louis, Missouri.

George Will had a recent column talking about the effect of U.S. demographics on national politics, and this line intrigued me:

"...the center of the nation's population, now southwest of St. Louis, is moving south and west at a rate of two feet an hour..."

I just had to find that map, which took all of two seconds with Google (I'm old enough to still find this new Internet thingie flat-out amazing).

It shows how the "mean center" of the population has moved from 1790 to 2000 (I thought only right-wingers were mean?). Click on the image for a bigger view, or check out the even-larger Census Bureau .pdf which I screen-captured.

Note the distinct turn South right after WW II, at the dawn of the air conditioning age. The current trajectory appears headed for El Paso.

And look, you can find the population center of your very own state right here.

Sunni/Shia Maps of the Middle East

This map of the Middle East on the PBS site shows the percentage of Shia Muslims in Middle Eastern nations (thus revealing the Sunni percentage), and this one gives a complete breakdown of religious, ethnic, and language distribution of the region. Very helpful. Lots of other history of Islam and the region as well on these PBS pages.

New Citizenship Test Questions Announced

The test that new U.S. citizens must take is being substantially revised. Just announced, here are the 144 questions that new citizens must study; of these, they will be asked to answer ten selected questions (randomly selected, I guess), and must answer six correctly.

I've been reading the questions, and I think they are pretty good, and a definite improvement over the old set.

And yes, though it's surely a cliche, I'll add: "Every American should be able to answer these."

First Muslim U.S. Rep. to Swear on the Koran. So, What Does the Constitution Say?

Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will take his oath of office on the Koran rather than the Bible.

In response, conservative pundit Dennis Prager has written a column criticizing Ellison. Prager's column is posted on the American Family Association website. The AFA, a religious right organization, is also asking people to push for "a law making the Bible the book used in the swearing-in ceremony of Representatives and Senators."

There's only one slight problem: it's blatantly unconstitutional to require a member of Congress to swear on the Bible, or to swear on any holy book for that matter:

Article VI of the U.S Constitution reads in part:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Forcing a person to swear on the Bible or get lost is not an option. Also note the option to offer an "Affirmation" rather than an "Oath."

Look, I'm a card-carrying member of the religious right, and I'm also very concerned about our abandonment of the Melting Pot ideal in favor of a mushy multiculturalism (just look at Western Europe if you want to know where the wrong path leads).

But these are complex issues, requiring principled thought, prudent action, and careful rhetoric. While it may get even more difficult to decide the best ways to stop the hemorrhaging on the cultural issues front, we can start by eliminating the Prager/AFA approach. Brute force that ignores the Constitution is dumb, it won't be effective, and it's wrong. We have to continue to argue for and from America's first principles, which are conveniently summarized in the Declaration of Independence and given the force of law in the Constitution. Let's leave the blatant disregard for the plain meaning of the text to the Left, shall we?