Miss America 2003, Erika Harold, yesterday said pageant officials have ordered her not to talk publicly about sexual abstinence, a cause she has advocated to teenage girls in Illinois.
“Quite frankly, and I’m not going to be specific, there are pressures from some sides to not promote [abstinence],“ the 22-year-old woman from Urbana, Ill., told The Washington Times.
In her first visit to Washington since winning the crown Sept. 21, Miss Harold resisted efforts by Miss America officials to silence her pro-chastity opinions.
“I will not be bullied,“ Miss Harold said yesterday at the National Press Club, as officials tried to prevent reporters from asking questions about her abstinence message.
Miss Harold, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Illinois, was “furious” as she arrived for yesterday’s press conference, an acquaintance said.
George Bauer, interim chief executive officer of the Miss America organization, and other pageant officials had sternly directed her to talk only about the issue of youth-violence prevention and to say nothing about sexual abstinence, said Miss Harold’s acquaintance, who asked not to be named.
“They laid it on her coming over here” not to promote teen chastity, the acquaintance said before the press conference began. “She’s furious about it.“
An anonymous Atlanta-area wag once said it, and I have to agree: “Zero tolerance equals zero intelligence.“ Just what the @#$!! is wrong with Miss America advising young people not to have sex before they’re married???
LOS ANGELES—A billion miles beyond Pluto, astronomers have discovered a frozen celestial body 800 miles across—the biggest find in the solar system since the ninth planet was spotted 72 years ago. But astronomers do not consider the newfound object a planet.
The object is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and orbits the sun once every 288 years at a distance of 4 billion miles. It is only half the size of Pluto, which some astronomers have come to believe should not have been designated a planet at all.
Planetary astronomer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and postdoctoral scholar Chadwick Trujillo discovered the object in images taken June 4. They were to announce their discovery Monday in Birmingham, Ala., at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s division of planetary sciences.
“It’s about the size of all the asteroids put together, so this thing is really quite big,“ Brown said.
BOWIE, Md. — A 13-year-old boy was shot and critically wounded Monday morning in front of a middle school in Prince George's County, Md.
It was not immediately known if the shooting was related to last week's sniper shootings that killed six people and wounded one in the Washington area. Police hunting for a spree killer in neighboring Montgomery County rushed investigators to the scene of the school shooting.
The boy was wounded in the chest and abdomen outside Benjamin Tasker Middle School, said Mark Brady of the fire department. Initial reports were that the child was shot from a distance.
If this is related to the other shootings, then we now have a strong case for a deliberate campaign of terrorism. Most of the shootings have occurred during the morning rush hour period, suggesting an effort to frighten people out of going to work. This latest seems calculated to scare people into keeping their kids home from school.
In his book Witness, Whittaker Chambers tells how he came to oppose the Communist side of the Cold War, not just abroad as represented by the then-Soviet Union, but at home as represented in one respect by the Communist Party USA, and in another by the intellectual elites who argued that, first, it was not possible for the West to win the Cold War and, second, it wouldn't be right for the West to win the Cold War.
As his life wore on, Chambers remained convinced that Communist victory over the West was inevitable, but that opposing that victory was the only moral choice. Long after Chambers' death, Americans elected a President who not only believed Western victory in the Cold War was right, but that it was possible. Of course the elites were aghast -- and to this day they refuse to forgive Ronald Reagan for proving them wrong.
Every time I think about softening my view that the "War on Drugs" should continue to be fought, I remember Whittaker Chambers. And I also remember a onetime friend of my brother's, who now awaits execution at San Quentin because of his drug-abetted self-destruction -- not to mention the innocent woman he killed. And I remember my brother's friend who was murdered as he slept in his car, probably by "gangsta" wannabe's. I was never even on the outermost margins of the wrong side of the drug war, and I can easily come up with several more names of people whose lives I saw ruined.
At no time during the Cold War was public sentiment in favor of giving up, even under threat of nuclear annihilation. And at no time during the drug war has public sentiment been in favor of giving up. If there are particular places where moderation on marijuana policy has been given a temporary, limited chance, it would be a mistake for anyone who favors a wholesale rollback of anti-drug policies to take it as willingness to go any further. Just as softened views on Communism from some politicians led to the backlash that put Ronald Reagan into the White House, I believe that the American people will react badly to finding the pendulum swung too far on drug policy.
As far as I know, the only publicly embraced moderation on marijuana remains in those very few jurisdictions where marijuana is permitted for medicinal purposes only. I can envision one day having THC listed as a controlled substance available by prescription only. Beyond that, I don't think America wants to go, and I doubt ever will.
Did you know our earth has two moons, the second being a little poo-squat rock named Cruithne? Me either. But now it seems we may have third one.
Why don’t people tell me these things?
Update: Turns out Cruithne isn’t technically a “moon” either. (BTW, when I use a Wikipedia link it’s usually because from there you can find links to more complete—and probably more accurate—information.)
I can’t find it on the web, but I caught a teaser on today’s Fox News Live for a story about how dogs attending a tennis tournament in New York are required, like the rest of us, to wear photo ID.
My only reaction was, Why not? Rats and weasels have been getting press credentials for years.
There's a news quasi-story going around about the results of a survey asking what people think was the most significant event of the last hundred years. What I've been hearing excludes two of the three events I would choose for their impacts on American and world attitudes in subsequent years.
The winner of the survey was, of course, the terrorist attacks of last September 11, and I won't disagree. That event promises to affect attitudes for a generation, in much the same way as my other two choices.
The first would be the stock market crash in October 1929. Anyone who knows someone who lived through the Great Depression knows the tremendous impact it had on the attitudes of that era's children and young adults. Rush Limbaugh often tells (including in one or both of his books) how his parents' attitudes toward getting and keeping a job, for example, were shaped by the economic privations widely experienced in those days. I remember how popular culture caricatured some Depression-era survivors as so distrusting banks that even in the prosperous 1950s and early 1960s they supposedly kept all their money in their mattresses; that was of course an exaggeration (all caricatures are) but it was rooted in the distressed view of economic circumstance that growing up in such times will cultivate in people.
The Depression also brought forth the first seeds of radicalism on American college campuses, as Stalino-Marxist views of economics, made superficially credible by economic circumstance, began to get widespread attention and were embraced by an up-and-coming generation of college professors, who were in place to exploit the second event on my list. (And we need not even get into the fact the Depression was worldwide and affected a certain central European country in such a way that eventually a radical ex-corporal born in Austria came to power and did some bad things...)
Anyway, the second event on my list would be the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which is widely believed to have been responsible for much of the idiotarian political agitation blamed on the earlier waves of Baby Boomers (which would include 1946-born Bill Clinton). There was clearly a cult of personality cultivated about JFK during his presidency by a fawning press and cultural elites, such that impressionable youngsters' hopes for a utopian future were inflated beyond all reason. When Lee Harvey Oswald (and, depending on whose ravings you attend, the CIA, the Trilateralists, and the Area 51 aliens) snuffed out the life of the 35th President, those unrealistic hopes were snuffed out just as violently. The resulting temper tantrums -- so it has been said -- were a natural reaction of thwarted children. Now that the first Boomers are in their mid-fifties, America's popular political culture is only beginning to outgrow the vengeful violence they inflicted upon it.
It remains to be seen what impact September 11 will ultimately have on the future of America and the world. I for one hope it will be more positive than the other two.
A reader named George Voon Hian Hee, from what looks like (based on the e-mail domain) the engineering/computer science sector at U.C. Berkeley, writes with questions about one of the possibilities I offered below in discussing the effect of cryonic suspension on the soul.
George's question is founded, I think, on a non-Western concept of the soul, which would of course lead to different conclusions than mine. I've asked him to consider going into this more fully -- on his blog, if he has one, so I can link to it, or in an e-mail that I would post here. But my initial response to one point he raised has got me wondering about whether we know enough about the human mind (as opposed to the brain, which is merely a bodily organ) to be able to predict what a cryonically suspended, and presumably still alive in some way, human being would undergo between initial preservation and ultimate revival.
I told George:
In Christian theology as I learned it, the soul is not equated with consciousness but I suppose it makes consciousness *possible* (Christian thinkers don't give a whole lot of attention to "consciousness"). But when attached to a human body it is only conscious when the body is able to perceive. A frozen body cannot perceive -- in theory, not even internally in the form of dreams -- so the soul would (in possibility #3) be just as oblivious to the passage of time as the body -- unless and until God retrieves it. And even if dreams are possible, they are perceived on an entirely different time scale than objective time.
Actually, the possibility of dreaming while in cryonic suspension does lead to some interesting considerations that I may have to post about: long periods of lucid dreaming and the effect on the psychology of an otherwise healthy revived mind. It might be not unlike the storied effect of longterm sensory deprivation. Something definitely to take into consideration, since we really don't know enough about the mind.
"Lucid dreaming" refers to dreams in which the sleeper suddenly realizes, perhaps due to some anomaly in the world as perceived in the dream, that one is dreaming. And research into near-death experiences suggests that the mind may be active even when the brain appears to be flatlined. So we really can't be sure that a frozen brain necessarily means total mental shutdown.
Suppose that our friend Ted, whiling away the decades in his tinfoil shroud (or whatever they use), is still sufficiently alive, and his brain still sufficiently engaged, as to have dreams. I figure ordinary dreams probably won't affect his mental health anymore than such dreams affect coma victims who are out of it for years at a time. But what if he has a dream and somehow realizes that it is a dream? His perceptions in this state are on a decidedly different timescale than his waking perceptions would have been -- partly because it is, after all, a dream, and partly because his brain is frozen.
This suggests that he might have no more subjective dreaming time than someone who is comatose for a couple of years -- but we actually don't know that much (do we?) about time perceptions in an unconscious state; they seem to vary widely in unfrozen brains, even the same one, from dream to dream. This might be a function of the level of sleep during which the particular REM episode occurs -- someone who's studied sleep states might be able to respond to this.
Thing is, for the rest of us, when a dream becomes sufficiently disturbing, we wake up. Our chilly friend can't do this -- and if he knows he's dreaming and realizes he can't wake up, then the situation becomes somewhat like what George described in his e-mail: "But my soul/consciousness is stuck in my body unable to do anything, and being aware of not being able to do anything." (emphasis mine.)
This, it seems to me, has to be something similar to being fully conscious while locked in a sensory deprivation chamber. It's my understanding that in the absence of sensory input even the conscious mind makes things up, and if the person can't open the chamber and get out, his sanity can be toast in very short order -- no matter how disciplined his mind might have been before.
My concept of the human mind is that it's sort of an interface between the purely tangible reality perceptible through our senses, and the conceptual reality that we manipulate while thinking deep thoughts. Stereotypes and assumptions and belief systems, inferences and hypotheses and theories, all of these originate in what we might choose to call a "virtual reality" inside our own heads. It's the clear difference between this virtual reality and objective, external reality (one can argue) that has led to thoughts of spirituality and the possibility of supernatural beings and all that. Or it may be that this difference allows us to realize that there are higher realities than our senses perceive. Insanity is arguably a loss of that distinction, and of the limits of the conceptual realm. The 20th Century even brought forth whole schools of thought that may be classified insane under this definition...
Some lucid dreamers are able to impose their will on their dreams. I did this once, in fact -- briefly. What would the revived Ted be like, sanity-wise, if he spent the better part of two centuries in a dream state from which he could not escape, imposing his will on the world he perceived, and having no reminder of an external world in which other wills had to be contended with?
If I had ever thought of going the corpsicle route myself, this would give me pause.
UPDATE 12:40 p.m. EDT: Rand Simberg offers some reasons why, in his view, the above isn't something to worry about.
First, the suspendee is given a heavy dose of barbiturates to prevent any pain that occurs during the temporary resuscitation necessary to circulate the anti-freeze. Since the body doesn't metabolize in suspension, this drugged state would persist until the body is repaired and revived.
I'm not sure that necessarily lays the matter to rest, but I think Rand's point is that the drugs would pose a barrier between whatever perceptions might occur in the supercooled brain during suspension, and any effect they might have on the reawakened person. That's a reasonable response.
Second, I find the notion that a body frozen at that temperature, with no ability for synapses to fire, could possibly have any consciousness at all to be much more unlikely than even the prospects for future reanimation.
This assertion is a denial of the implications of the near-death experience (NDE) research I mentioned above, said denial apparently resting on assumptions that I believe the NDE research at least purports to challenge. If you take the purely scientific view, the NDE findings are, after all, nothing more than assertions until independently reproduced.
But heck, there's no scientific basis for souls either, or for consciousness in the non-medical, metaphysical sense that George Voon Hian Hee used in his e-mail. Nor, when you get right down to it, for the idea of a mind that is distinct from cerebral activity. At least unless and until the NDE findings are reproduced.
Very interesting bloggin' over at Transterrestrial Musings, where Rand Simberg goes into considerable detail on cryonics and the Ted Williams controversy. He also links to Jay Manifold (warning: blogspot archive links may be hinky) on the same topic, which is also very interesting.
It may just be because I grew up watching science fiction TV shows where cryonic suspension was part of the technological milieu -- Khan Noonian Singh and his followers in suspended animation aboard Botany Bay on "Star Trek," or "Lost in Space's" Robinson family put into SA for the launch of the Jupiter II -- but I don't have the "yuck" reaction Rand and Jay mention in discussing this business. The only thing that potentially concerns me about it is the soul question. Suppose Ted Williams goes into the icebox, only to be brought out and thawed out in two hundred years? There are four possibilities for his soul:
He'll be revived as either a zombie or an undead because his soul will have been gone since 2002.
He'll be revived with his own soul because it waited around for him because it was somehow anticipated by God that the revival would occur.
He'll be revived with his own soul because he wasn't really quite spiritually dead when frozen, so his soul stayed in the carton and was kept Birdseye fresh.
He'll be revived with no problem because he never had a soul in the first place, you superstitious primitive, you.
The first option does carry a certain "yuck factor," because the idea there really can be soulless undead people in the world makes the short hairs stand on end -- and with my haircut, that's all of 'em. Actually, I have sometimes wondered if we don't already have a whole passel of these kinds of people wandering the earth: Charles Manson, Mohammed Atta, the Columbine monsters, they do kind of make you wonder. And no one wants to consign poor Ted Williams to this kind of existence. But if there are people winding up that way without being put in cold storage for a couple of centuries, it's hard to get so worked up about the corpsicles.
Nor do I consider the fourth possibility worth much concern. If it's true we don't have souls, then we don't go anywhere else after we die and all that we're worth is what we do in this life. That would mean a whole lot of deathbed conversions have gone for naught, and a whole lot of holier-than-thou types have gone over to the Big Unhappy (but mercifully brief) Surprise. Personally, if that's how it is, I don't want to know until I find out -- I'm only human, and if I could be certain there were no just rewards and no just punishments for how we live in this life, I can't promise I wouldn't take advantage. On the other hand, it would make Ted's future, if he has one, a lot simpler.
The third possibility bears similarity to what we've discovered about reviving people who have stopped breathing (e.g., drowning victims), or whose hearts have stopped beating. Presumably one day when we find a way reliably to revive even those who have flatlined for extended periods of time, we'll come to grips with that. Each such advancement has pushed back the definition of death beyond where it had previously been placed, and in each case we've come to terms with the idea that God doesn't snatch away the soul the instant we think someone is dead. Again, it would work reasonably well for Ted if this is how it is -- that God's definition of death extends far beyond ours. There are also the examples of people in comas for years, only to re-awaken.
Of course, this also raises the question of all those people who have been embalmed at a point where future revival technology might have saved them. Having lost my own mother six months ago, this is a troubling question -- or would be, if she had not already made up her own mind, after enduring years of illness, that it was time.
Number 2, though, goes a little deeper into the nature of our spirituality. It would require that God has anticipated and can accommodate anything we can come up with as we scratch around in the dirt which is not exactly beyond Him. It might trouble those who believe that souls sometimes return to earth in different bodies to live new lives, or those who embrace C.S. Lewis' thesis that Heaven is merely the return of the soul to its source, and that it loses itself in Him. To the first I would answer that spiritual life doesn't necessarily follow our timelines; if there is such a thing as reincarnation, it would not be beyond possibility for a single soul to inhabit simultaneously more than one body, at different points in its subjective timeline.
This also addresses the latter objection; but also, if He can separate a soul from Himself so it can be born into a life, He can also re-separate it so it can be revived after an interruption in that life. And to Ted, his 200-year absence from the land of the living would seem like a coma from which he has re-awakened.
I do believe there are things mankind can do that would be against God's will and contrary to His plan. Things like knocking down skyscrapers with thousands of people in them, blowing up the world with all of us still on it, etc. Although some could argue even these might further some intention to which we are not privy.
So I doubt that our extending life through application of scientific knowledge and technological prowess is necessarily going to throw God for a loop. We have to come to grips with the fact that no matter how highly we think of ourselves and our works, we're still just scratching around in the dirt.
Fireworks shows -- both at home and in big public displays -- are as much a part of the Fourth of July as hot weather and patriotic (or in some cases, pseudo-patriotic) newspaper editorials. And so are tut-tuts from well-meaning types about how little actual regard is being shown for what Independence Day commemorates.
I somehow doubt that the meaning of Independence Day is in danger of being lost -- this year least of all. After the most horrific attack on America, the people of this nation are not going to forget, much less deny, what makes it greater and more wonderful than any other. There is no place on earth where freedom is enjoyed more widely and with greater latitude than right here.
Independence Day is not about our military might, although that is clearly a result of what Independence Day means; nor is it about our unparallelled prosperity, although that too is made possible by what this day is about. Our unprecedented individual liberty is what has made our prosperity possible, and that prosperity is what makes it possible for a nation where only those who wish to serve do so, to have the most formidable military capability ever seen in human history.
America is not perfect, because wherever its inspiration may come from, it remains a thing made and maintained by fallible mortal men. Yet it is the freest, richest, mightiest nation ever known.
Let us have our picnics and our pageants. Let shopkeepers festoon their stores with flags and bunting in hopes of attracting customers. Let politicians bloviate in hopes of attracting votes. Let the Enlightened tut-tut if it makes them happy.
Living in America is reason enough to be full of joy.
[WARNING: The following may be offensive to Michael Newdow, though it shouldn't be and is not meant to be.]
Most gracious and loving Father, as we celebrate today the gift You have bestowed upon this nation, and upon we whom You have seen fit to bring here, please bless us and protect us and our loved ones from those who would cause us harm because of their hatred for this nation and what it represents. Please reach into their hearts and show them why their hatred is wrong, and why we are not their enemies. Let our joy be today unblemished by fear or grief, by hurt or anger. Let all Americans share in this day in their way, with brotherhood outshining our differences. Amen.
