It’s certainly possible to manipulate genes to improve a species. Indeed, Norman Borlaug has probably saved more lives than anybody in history by developing high yield crops. The thing to remember with Mr. Borlaug, however, is that he’s been experimenting with plants, which are much simpler than animals.
Breeding animals is an order of magnitude more complicated. Turkeys, to pick one example, have become so dumb that they can’t mate and need to be artificially inseminated—and after all that trouble, they’re not bright enough to sit down before laying eggs. To pick a less extreme but still instructive example, purebred dogs may have some flashy characteristics, but they usually have worse health and behavior problems than mutts.
Genes are enormously complicated in the ways they interact with each other, but the transhumanist movement seems to think that this can be overcome with splices and perhaps some selective breeding and culling. The topic of eugenics came up over at Ross Douthat’s blog, and Prettier than Napoleon had this to say about it:
How about this: Hector Dauphin-Gloire and his ideological compatriots can have a society where pain, suffering, and death feature prominently, and the rest of us can pursue transhumanist ends to avoid these things. The problem is not that people have these bizarre ideas about the necessity of suffering for development of virtue, it’s that they seek to make the rest of us “virtuous” by causing us to suffer and die.
It is certainly true that suffering does not necessarily lead to virtue, as anybody who’s been around very sick people knows. But being skeptical of (as I am) or opposed to (as Dauphin-Gloire is) transhumanism isn’t causing transhumanist proponents to suffer and die; that happens anyway; it’s part of being human.
People have been trying since the beginning of history to use knowledge to stave off suffering and death. And some good men, like Mr. Borlaug, have been successful. But the danger of meddling with complex systems is that unforeseen effects may make things worse. The social engineers of the Great Society tried to end poverty with generous welfare payments and subsidized housing; they got an explosion of illegitimacy, a sagging work ethic, and a crime wave. Now, the transhumanist bioengineers propose that we tinker with genes. We still can’t locate, let alone manipulate, all the genes that affect skin color, and they expect to cure complicated diseases like cystic fibrosis?
In every movement, no matter how admirable, exist the bureaucratic souls who carry every idea past the point of insanity. As the word “transhumanist” suggests, we’re blurring the line between human and animal. To be skeptical of transhumanism’s potential requires a rudimentary understanding of science and a desire not to see humans treated like dogs and turkeys. (Religion is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition.)
Perhaps the transhumanists will find the fountain of youth that eluded Juan Ponce de Leon. But it seems unlikely. Until then, suffering and death will bring out our virtues—or our vices. Will the fear of death, combined with the promise or will o’ the wisp of transhumanism, bring out good or bad?
The morass in Iraq and deepening difficulties in Afghanistan have not deterred the Bush administration from taking on a dangerous and questionable new secret operation. High-level U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts on a joint military operation to suppress Kurdish guerrillas and capture their leaders. Through covert activity, their goal is to forestall Turkey from invading Iraq.
While detailed operational plans are necessarily concealed, the broad outlines have been presented to select members of Congress as required by law. U.S. Special Forces are to work with the Turkish army to suppress the Kurds’ guerrilla campaign. The Bush administration is trying to prevent another front from opening in Iraq, which would have disastrous consequences. But this gamble risks major exposure and failure.
“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” the senator said. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”
He might as well have said, “Anybody here getting their hedge fund portfolios screwed by excessive exposure to these Collateralized Debt Obligations since Moody’s started rebranding Triple A’s?” Iowa doesn’t have a Whole Foods Market, not in the whole state. The cuisine of Iowa consists of Corn Dogs and “funnel cakes,” which are a kind of home-made grease donut rolled in sugar.
I happen to be a fan of funnel cake, which is sold at RFK Stadium here in DC, but the point is made. (H/T)
Side note: Eugene Robinson was wondering today if white Americans would accept Obama:
I hear from African Americans who are excited about Obama’s candidacy but who suspect that somehow, when push comes to shove, “they” won’t let him win. It’s unclear who “they” might be — white voters, the “power structure,” the alignment of the stars — and it’s unclear how “they” are going to thwart Obama’s ambition. The point is that, somehow, he’ll be denied.
This anecdotal evidence finds some empirical support in the polls, although it’s far from definitive. A recent CNN poll of Democrats in South Carolina — a crucial, early-primary state where African Americans will cast about half the Democratic votes — showed Hillary Clinton leading Obama by a bigger margin among blacks than among whites. And while white respondents thought Clinton had only a slightly better chance of winning the 2008 general election than Obama, blacks who were polled thought Clinton was fully twice as likely to beat a generic Republican opponent.
Americans, black or white, aren’t fond of voting for elitists. It’s why our leaders go to great lengths to appear ordinary (Eisenhower, for example, was a brilliant strategist, politician, and tactician, but he made a point of mispronouncing words to appear duller than he actually was). Hillary Clinton would never talk about shopping at Whole Foods on the campaign trail, and that’s why she’s doing well amongst the blue collar workers who like funnel cake and think lettuce comes in either iceberg or romaine. Barack Obama talks about Whole Foods, which is why he’s popular amongst the upper middle class voters who can afford to pay whatever arugula costs.
If Obama can’t get his act together, Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.
Hubbard posted this at 1:13 PM EDT on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 as Audacity of Hype
As we all know, using reputable sources like Sicko, Cuba, France, England et al are bastions of health and happiness because of the wonders of socialized medicine. They live long, have better and cheaper care – everyone gets exactly what they need just when they need it.
A PENSIONER who borrowed more than £7,000 to pay for a hip operation abroad after being told she was too overweight to be treated on the NHS is trying to claim the money back from health chiefs.
Former Bartlet Hospital canteen worker Moira Ryan, 69, from Felixstowe, flew to Malta with her son for the successful hip replacement.
The total bill for their trip, including hospital costs, flights and accommodation, was £7,200 – and now she wants Suffolk Primary Care Trust to foot the bill.
The PCT had refused her treatment because of its policy of not providing surgery to most people with a body mass index of more than 35 unless they go through a weight-loss plan.
See Michael Moore? See what I did there? I used a cherry picked annecdotal story to prove, yes PROVE that socialized medicine is an evil blight upon humanity and that drastic governmental rationing occurs forcing poor old ladies on fixed incomes to take out loans, yes LOANS from evil greedy banks to get the treatment they need. See what socialized medicine does to people!
On the bright side – if Michael gets his way at least we know he won’t get that triple bypass he is sure to desperately need – he’s practically a beached whale.
James Clyburn, Majority Whip in the House, had a remarkable admission in the Post:
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Monday that a strongly positive report on progress on Iraq by Army Gen. David Petraeus likely would split Democrats in the House and impede his party’s efforts to press for a timetable to end the war.
Clyburn, in an interview with the washingtonpost.com video program PostTalk, said Democrats might be wise to wait for the Petraeus report, scheduled to be delivered in September, before charting next steps in their year-long struggle with President Bush over the direction of U.S. strategy.
Is Clyburn implying that some members of the Democratic caucus were hoping for a negative report? And wouldn’t a negative report be a sign of the military’s failure?
Screw the Constitution, says a UCLA professor. You can only be a member of his club if you’re willing to enforce his preferences by judicial fiat. Those who support the policies but aren’t sure they’re constitutionally required need not apply.
I have yet to see the new Simpsons movie. But I thought Kyle Smith’s review of it was brilliant. A sample:
HOMER
Whoo-hoo! I’m gonna be in a movie!
MARGE
That’s nice, Homey. But at the moment there’s an angry mob outside with torches.
LISA
Is my new environmentally aware Irish boyfriend out there?
BART
Lisa’s got a boyfriend! Lisa’s got a boyfriend!
LISA
You’re the one who shows his wiener in this movie.
HOMER
Mmm. Wiener.
MARGE
Something about this movie strikes me as awfully familiar.
COMIC BOOK GUY
I of course have already seen “The Simpsons Movie” and decreed on my blog that the star power of musical guest Green Day does not measure up to The Who or U2. The good news is, “The Simpsons Movie” is just like the TV show, whereas the bad news is, it’s just like the TV show. Instead of trying something radically different, it follows a conventional plotline of Homer screwing up and trying to fix the situation. Though it does have a handful of dirty jokes meant to earn the audience-pleasing PG-13 rating and features Marge swearing, it falls short of classic status.
Smith did give it 4 stars; I give the review 5.
Hubbard posted this at 2:03 PM EDT on Monday, July 30th, 2007 as Pop Culture Is Filth
Geoff, it seems as though being an Arab princess (or an Arab princess’s overbearing male companion) does not get you respect from the airlines. Also not getting respect on this flight were the rest of the passengers who were delayed for three hours by an utterly ridiculous situation. So perhaps you should exclude British Airways as well.
Though on reading this story my first thought was: “The Emir of Qatar only flies business class?” Mistreatment by airlines is a great democratizing force. It’s not that good to be the king anymore.
Since I’m spending a while in Franceland, I’m not following news too closely. The only bit of French news I’ve caught so far was theirr on-screen headline for the first day of the flooding in England: “Eau My God!”
The one story I’ve found interesting enough to follow online is the Scott Thomas affair. The best comment defending Thomas so far has to be today’s post from the One True Conservative™:
Well, I trawled through the various knuckle-dragging websites and there’s still no actual, you know, evidence that he fabricated anything. Maybe he did. First-person war-stories are always hard to verify beyond a shadow of a doubt, no? But if Malkin can’t dredge up something and fling it by now, no one can. Unhinged bigot Ace tries dredging through others’ private lives again. When in doubt, aim for the girlfriend.
Notice what just happened? He’s placing an affirmative burden of proof on critics of the piece. It’s not up to The New Republic to fact check its pieces and be prepared to offer some evidence to back up some pretty outlandish claims; rather it’s up to Michelle Malkin to affirmatively disprove those claims.
He calls Michelle Malkin a “knuckle-dragger,” Ace of Spades an “unhinged bigot,” but has nothing negative to say about someone who at best can be called an extraordinarily insensitive human being. All Malkin and Ace ever did was to believe that American soldiers were incapable of wearing children’s skulls as crowns, and to ask for evidence regarding some rather incredible stories. Sullivan now hates the right-wing blogosphere more than he loves truth. It’s a sad state of affairs for someone who contributed so much creating the blogosphere; I’m sure a Greek could write a play about this.
In the post below, Jaime links to this Charles Krauthammer column, which argues that Barack Obama has made two major foreign policy gaffes as a presidential candidate.
I think he is wrong on one count and half right on the other.
On the subject of Barack Obama’s willingness to meet with rogue leaders, Krauthammer says:
To be on the same stage as the leader of the world’s greatest power is of course a prize. That is why the Chinese deemed it a slap in the face that President Bush last year denied President Hu Jintao the full state-visit treatment. The presence of an American president is a valued good to be rationed — and granted only in return for important considerations.
Moreover, summits can also be traps if they’re not wired in advance for success, such as Nixon’s trip to China, for which Henry Kissinger had already largely hammered out the famous Shanghai communique. You don’t go hoping for the best, as Hillary’s husband learned at the 2000 Camp David summit, when Yasser Arafat’s refusal of Israel’s peace offer brought Arafat worldwide opprobrium — from which he sought (successfully, as it turned out) to escape by launching the second intifada. Such can be the consequences of ill-prepared summits.
All of this presumes that Obama would meet with foreign leaders absent any preparations, at a formal summit with television cameras and handshakes, etc. Does anyone find that even remotely plausible?
The confusion comes from the question’s phrasing, which asked if Obama would meet “without preconditions,” a phrase that I understood a certain way when I heard the question. What does that phrase mean? What did Obama understand it to mean when he answered the question?
I thought it meant no substantive preconditions — that is, that the leader of Iran wouldn’t have to agree to abide by UN Resolutions or renounce his nuclear program before a meeting was granted. Obama critics are acting as though he agreed to meet with no preconditions at all, a meaning I never imagined because it is absurd. If the question really meant no preconditions at all, Obama would agree to a meeting in a dark alley without the Secret Service present. Again, is it even remotely plausible that the questioner meant “without precondition” literally?
I’m frustrated by the controversy because it seems to me obvious that what Obama meant to communicate, and what any reasonable person would take away from his answer, is that he doesn’t object in principle to meeting with rogue leaders, as the president does, and that he’s in theory willing to do so during his first term, assuming precautions have been taken and groundwork done to assure the greatest chance for success and the least chance for failure.
Now on to Krauthammer’s second example:
During the April 26 South Carolina candidates’ debate, Brian Williams asked what kind of change in the U.S. military posture abroad Obama would order in response to a hypothetical al Qaeda strike on two American cities.
Obama’s answer: “Well, the first thing we would have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response — something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.”
Asked to be commander-in-chief, Obama could only play first-responder-in-chief. Caught off guard, and without his advisers, he simply slipped into two automatic talking points: emergency response and its corollary — the obligatory Katrina Bush-bash.
This is slightly unfair to Obama. Here is his full answer:
Well, the first thing we’d have to do is make sure that we’ve got an effective emergency response, something that this administration failed to do when we had a hurricane in New Orleans.
And I think that we have to review how we operate in the event of not only a natural disaster, but also a terrorist attack.
The second thing is to make sure that we’ve got good intelligence, a., to find out that we don’t have other threats and attacks potentially out there, and b., to find out, do we have any intelligence on who might have carried it out so that we can take potentially some action to dismantle that network.
But what we can’t do is then alienate the world community based on faulty intelligence, based on bluster and bombast. Instead, the next thing we would have to do, in addition to talking to the American people, is making sure that we are talking to the international community.
Because as already been stated, we’re not going to defeat terrorists on our own. We’ve got to strengthen our intelligence relationships with them, and they’ve got to feel a stake in our security by recognizing that we have mutual security interests at stake.
The knock on Obama is that he didn’t say he’d retaliate, only that we’d “potentially” take some action. Not words that create a deterrent effect. But surely the first thing that you do — the first thing we did after 9/11 — is effective emergency response, and surely it’s legitimate for a Democratic presidential candidate to bash the Bush Administration for it’s response to Hurricane Katrina. It’s obligatory, as Krauthammer writes, because it’s a clear example of a catastrophic failure of leadership, and the point that we need to be better prepared if a terrorist attack causes disaster on the same scale is a good one to make.
Finally, making sure we have good intelligence, making other countries feel they have a stake in our national security and strengthening our alliances are obvious presidential functions that go beyond the “first responsder in chief” role that Krauthammer pokes fun at.
Again, I wish he’d more strongly mentioned that he’d retaliate, but I’m confident that a President Obama would retaliate if we knew the perpetrators. Does anyone doubt that?
conor friedersdorf posted this at 3:45 PM EDT on Friday, July 27th, 2007 as Uncategorized
Conor argues in his post over at Huff Post that the Obama Summit Gaffe is much ado about nothing.
Charles Krauthammer seems to disagree – I’m more inclined to side with Charlie on this one. Obama comes across like the fresh-faced, centrist, Washington outsider, but to me his comments often seem hopelessly naive.
I have a few friends who like to claim they aren’t ultra-liberal and yet they have bought into Obama hook, line and sinker. To me he’s just another inexperienced ultra-liberal with starry visions of how the world should work – instead of dealing with these power-mad dictators in a way that does work.
Jamie posted this at 1:29 PM EDT on Friday, July 27th, 2007 as Kraut-hammered
Personally I haven’t found the Simpsons funny in about 8 years (Season 10 was the last funny one for me). Consequently I will be skipping the movie this weekend – I’m at Comic-Con in San Diego.
Jonah offers up his thoughts in the most recent G-File.
If what this report is insinuating is true — or even partially true — we’re in for a real firestorm. What really worries me, is that Mendoza is a damn good reporter.
AP: New Details on Tillman’s Death
By MARTHA MENDOZA 07.26.07, 7:28 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO –
Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
“The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,” a doctor who examined Tillman’s body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.
The doctors – whose names were blacked out – said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
Eep.
Tom posted this at 1:01 PM EDT on Friday, July 27th, 2007 as Iraq, Journalism
