Optimistic naturalists

A correspondent was recently asking me about a particular argument naturalists sometimes use. Now, to me, this argument sounds so incredibly lame that I can never understand why smart people are the least bit impressed by it. It's just like saying, "Oh, never mind the evidence. I'm sure we'll figure that out eventually. Move along. Nothing to see here." Why would anybody listen to this?

But it's been put forward very seriously by various people and was worrying my correspondent, so Tim and I responded, and I have a post up at W4 based on that response.

The naturalist's argument basically goes, "Science has made great strides and achievements and has explained lots and lots of stuff that we didn't used to understand. So eventually, whatever it is that you are bringing up as evidence for the existence of God or for any entity that isn't strictly non-naturalistic will also be explained as a purely naturalistic phenomenon."

This is just such a bad argument. The sense in which science has made great strides and achievements--you know, finding the causes of diseases, discovering very small particles and figuring out how they interact, seeing the inner workings of the cell, figuring out the basic laws of planetary motion--in no sense tends to confirm that there is nothing but matter in the world and that everything has a physical cause. How could it?

To my mind, this is just one step up, if that, from the Bultmannian claim that we can't possibly believe in miracles in the age of the electric lightbulb.

But my W4 post is much more dignified than this little rant. (Ahem. Really. Much more dignified.) Enjoy.

I've Got the Joy

The rest of the family is recovered, and I'm on the road to recovery. Being able to breathe again more or less freely is nice.

I hope later to have a post linking and briefly summarizing a contentful post at W4 about science and naturalism. But as I haven't yet written that contentful post...below is a song by the Gofish guys called "I've Got the Joy." Normally I am a "less is more" kind of person in music and tend to look down a bit on fancy effects with electronics--voice altering, stuff like that. But these guys do it all with such an innocent love of fun, and of kids, that I can't help enjoying it. And it sure beats the version of "I've Got the Joy" that we sang in Sunday School when I was a kid!

Eldest Daughter (16) has found several of these Gofish videos on-line and plays them for Youngest Daughter (age 5). This particular one is probably their favorite, but there was a brief tragedy when it disappeared temporarily from Youtube. It's back now, and also safely downloaded in case it disappears again.

"I've Got the Joy" by Gofish:

Inasmuch

2 1/2 years ago or so I read the story below on, of all sites, Little Green Footballs, in a comments thread. I have gone back since then and tried diligently to find that comment with the story, but I haven't been able to find it, so you'll have to take my word for it. I no longer read LGF. It's changed for the worse (to put it mildly). But this story will always remain with me and deserves to be told and heard more widely, even though it is hearsay. The comment author said that a family friend used to tell this story about herself--that is, she was the woman in the story--at meals with his family. And here it is, in my words, and as I remember it. I am not sure that the city was Odessa, though it was in that part of the world.

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Once there was a woman who lived in Odessa. The Nazis came, and they began killing the Jews. One early morning, the woman went out with a basket on her arm to shop. As she was walking across a square in the city, she saw a large group of children coming, marshaled by a soldier. When they got near, the soldier said to her, "Ma'am, can you take any of these children with you? Perhaps even just one? They are Jewish children, and where I am taking them, they will die." One beautiful little boy broke away from the group and ran up to her. "Auntie," he said, "Please take me with you. I promise I won't eat much." She looked down at him for a moment, and then she slowly shook her head and hurried on. A few streets away, she was suddenly horrified at herself. She ran back to the square, but the children and the soldier were gone, and she never saw any of them again. And later in life, the only thing she could do to make amends was to tell what she had done.

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And Jesus took a little child, and set him by him, and said unto them, "Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me."

Then shall the King say to those on his left, "Inasmuch as ye have not done it unto the least of these, ye have not done it unto me."

They really do want your children

Most of you will have seen this post of mine already at W4, but for anyone who hasn't...My husband found an incredible, amazing quote from the well-known (now late) philosopher Richard Rorty openly bragging about discrediting Christian parents in their children's eyes, about reprograming them, and the like. I want to point out for those of you who are (understandably) hesitant about quoting what you see on the web that Tim verified this quotation from the "look inside" function for the book itself on Amazon. It's legit, and in fact the full version is even more shocking than the portion quoted on Wikipedia. Here's a teaser to get you to go to W4 if you aren't a regular W4 reader:

The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, these people would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more herrschaftsfrei [domination free] than that in the Hitler Youth camps.

These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students....When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank....I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.

And there's more, here.

Schiavo case trial transcripts available on-line

I am blogging this in multiple places to bring it to the attention of the Google bots for searching researchers. My thanks to Zippy who has put it up on his blog.

I have just finished an article for the forthcoming issue of The Christendom Review on some legal aspects of the Terri Schiavo case. In the course of doing research for it, I managed (by dint of much and persistent e-mailing) to get hold of the trial transcripts of all the witness testimony in the Schiavo case. As far as I have been able to tell, these transcripts are not available elsewhere on-line.

Because people will be studying and discussing Terri Schiavo's death (murder, I would say) for many years to come, it seems to me extremely important that the witness testimony be available. The judge's job was to decide that there was "clear and convincing evidence" that Terri would have wanted to be dehydrated to death. Judge Greer's opinion is on-line here. (Greer's opinion, unlike the testimony transcripts, has been available on-line all along.)

Greer's opinion does not quote the witness testimony he is using. He just alludes to it, sometimes extremely vaguely, and sometimes even erroneously. News stories usually contain only bits and pieces, and their sources are unclear.

Greer dismissed Diane Meyer's testimony on the basis of his erroneous belief that Karen Ann Quinlan died before 1982. It is interesting to see how Meyer stands up to George Felos, the opposing attorney, who tries to put words into her mouth and confuse her. She did an especially good job given that Felos apparently succeeded in temporarily convincing everyone at Terri's trial that Quinlan actually died in 1976 when her ventilator was removed. In fact, she lived until 1985.

On my personal web page I now have

--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Diane Meyer
--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Scott Schiavo
--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Joan Schiavo
--A complete transcript of all the witness testimony, including the testimony of Michael Schiavo and Mrs. Schindler, in a web page html form.

These five were the witnesses who claimed to have had conversations with Terri about end-of-life issues.

I owe the Diane Meyer transcript directly to Pat Anderson, one of the Schindlers' lawyers. I owe the complete transcript to Atty. Joe Bell, who took a PDF that he had from Pat Anderson and made a careful project of translating it into searchable text.

My hope is that now when people search "Schiavo" and "trial transcripts," "Diane Meyer," and other such phrases, they will have more luck than I did in finding these important documents on-line.

Cross-posted

Very miscellaneous

We, corporately, have a cold. That is, my family is now passing around a real doozy of a cold. So far I have been mostly spared, except for a pretty bad earache (of my own) and fatigue from going pointlessly into Youngest Daughter's room in the middle of the night when she's coughing her head off and saying, "Do you need anything? Do you need to go potty? Are you okay?"

However, this just adds to the general lack of inspiration for posts here at Extra Thoughts which seems to have been afflicting me for some five weeks or so now and for which I apologize to any readers I have retained. Over at W4 I have a new post about the latest and craziest manifestation of what I call the "choice devours itself" phenomenon: "Suicide assistance" as outright murder. The person who supposedly wants to die gets his hands held down by his "exit guide" if he changes his mind and tries to tear the plastic bag off his head. I can't help thinking, "They can't come up with anything worse than this," and then they do.

In other news that looks like satire but isn't, the AP just put up a headline this morning, "Karzai Welcomes Obama Call to Reach out to Taliban." That's right. You read that right. We're supposed to "reach out" to the Taliban. I suppose that's what they mean by Hope and Change--acting like liberal fools towards some of the most evil people in the world, people who have devoted their lives to figuring out how to murder more American civilians. Oh, wait, I missed it: We're supposed to be reaching out to the moderates in the Taliban. Well, that's different, of course. Glad we got that cleared up.

And finally, I had a mildly interesting technical thought in church this morning. (Priest: "The Lord be with you." Youngest Daughter: "Coughcoughcoughcoughcoughcoughcough." Eldest Daughter, "It looks like C. [Middle Daughter] is crying." Me (whispering to Middle Daughter): "What's wrong, honey?" Middle Daughter: "I'm losing my voice." Me: "Do you need anything now? Please don't cry." Middle Daughter: "I'm not crying." Priest: "Lift up your hearts..." And so forth.) Anyway, the technical thought was that probability theory is neutral as between substantive conclusions. There isn't such a thing as a "Christian" probability theory. That, I already knew. But people may be confused into thinking that it isn't neutral when we notice that some correct form of probabilistic modeling (like, say, Bayesian probability theory) helps us to model evidence accurately in a way that prevents certain confusions that anti-religious skeptics like to exploit.

I played "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" for the postlude. I wonder if anyone besides my family recognized it. Years ago a friend (who is now Eastern Orthodox but was then Baptist) asked me, "Do Baptists have any Lent hymns?" Well, yes and no. It seems to me that all the dedication and devotion hymns are absolutely perfect for Lent. "Have Thine Own Way, Lord." "Take My Life and Let It Be." And especially, "Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone." But not hymns any more specifically about Lent than that, for obvious historical reasons. Still, it would do some stuffy Anglicans good to learn, "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" ("no turning back..." "the world behind me, the cross before me...") and all those others. And to sing them and enjoy them, too. And a good Lenten meditation into the bargain.

Okay, ththththat's all, folks.

A conjecture

I conjecture that the present economic difficulties of the U.S. will strengthen the grip of political correctness in both business and in higher education. People will be afraid either of losing their jobs or of not being hired in the first place and hence will be more susceptible than ever to intimidation, more careful than ever not to say anything to offend the noisiest and nastiest of the bullies in their fields. I would think the effect might even be stronger in the business world than in the academy. In the business world you can't even say, "I have tenure."

What do you think?

Crossposted at W4

Comic relief

I have been doing taxes. This is not fun. It will give me a break to pass along something funny. (HT Esteemed husband)

If you want to read a normal and serious blog post on a (very) serious subject from me, here is my most recent post at W4.

But now for something completely different. I thought the appeal of this might depend on one's being of a (ahem) age to have heard it a bit closer to its original time period, but evidently not. All three of the young McGrews, even the one who usually thinks jokes are "weird," have been going around singing this and laughing their heads off. So I guess it has age-transcending humor value.

Poor elf. I hope someone can help him out.

How to get hold of a person

Among the many vital life skills I'm going to have to convey to my poor children before sending them off to live on their own, one that I have had to hammer out for myself (it not having been necessary when I was twenty years old) is this: How do you get past the determination of government agencies and big companies not to let you speak to a real human being?

It's getting ridiculous. I'm going to a conference next summer which requires a passport. I picked up the form at the post office, looked it over, and had a bunch of questions. Like, "When it says 'mother's place of birth,' is state enough, or do I have to know the city?" These are not going to be found in a pre-recorded message. So I call my local post office and get a recorded message saying, "If you need information on passports, hang up and dial ________." So I hang up and dial the number, where I get a recorded phone tree, one branch of which is "information on passports." I (stupidly--I should know better by this time) press that button and get recorded information which is obviously not going to answer my seventeen detailed questions about the application form. So I hang up and try again. This time I refuse to press any of the phone tree options. The phone tree, by the way, is run by a perky-voiced computer. The only way, I discover, to get it to give you a human being is to say something the perky lady computer can't understand. When I say, "Other information," the computer says, "Okay, state briefly what you are calling about." When I say, "I have some questions about how to fill out a passport application form," the computer says, "You want passport information, is that right?" I say, "Not if you're just going to send me back to that pre-recorded message." "I'm sorry," says the computer, "I couldn't tell if you answered yes or no." I yell, "I want to speak to a human being!" The computer says, "I'm sorry, I couldn't understand you." After a little while of this back and forth, it transfers me to a human being. I state my purpose in calling. The human representative says, in a bored voice, "If you want information about passports, you have to call the National Passport Information service." After expressing a little outrage, I ask for that phone number, hang up, and dial it.

At the Passport Information Service I encounter another phone tree. But this time I'm canny. I resist the temptation to press 3 for information on applying for a passport, because I know it will be a recorded message rather than anything that will answer my questions. I sit on my hands and grit my teeth, even when we get to the end of all the options and none is given for speaking to a representative. (The National Passport Information Service doesn't have a chatty computer.) But magically, when I just sit there for about five full, long, seconds, it says, "Hold on while I transfer you to a customer service representative." It worked! This final person has a very heavy Asian accent and is barely understandable, and she has trouble understanding some of my questions, but she answers most of them. Phew! Mission accomplished.

It's getting ridiculous. And more seriously, if I weren't already used to this problem, it could sometimes be scary. I cannot count the number of times that I have wondered if it would ever be possible to get hold of a person to answer a specific question and what I would do if it turned out to be impossible to reach anyone. Companies and government bureaus have stopped even offering you the human representative option. It's a game: Can you figure out how to get to talk to a human? So here are my tips, when "speak to a customer service representative" is not a given option.

1) Say something the talking computer can't understand. I've used this successfully with JC Penney now as well as the Post Office.

2) Press zero. This has worked many times even when the computer didn't list zero as an option in the phone tree. It usually doesn't do any harm to try it, but wait until after all the options in the phone tree have been listed. I seem to recall using it successfully with banks.

(Either 1 or 2 is necessary for sending a package from your house using Federal Express, but I can't remember now which it is.)

3) Wait until all options have been given and then sit tight. Count to ten, at least, to see if it rings you over to a human representative.

4) Hang up, call back, and see if you responded to the phone tree too early. There may have been an earlier point in the process where one of the above options would have worked if you hadn't chosen a numbered option.

5) Most importantly, if you have a specific question, never fall for the invitation to press a number for "information," even if the description of the information corresponds to the area you want to ask about. It's almost always a long-winded recorded message that won't answer your question. And such messages are a dead-end road on the phone tree. There is never an option given to speak to a representative after you patiently listen to the recorded information. It's just a waste of time.

There is something mildly alarming about the fact that we even have to talk about this stuff. But I'm quite serious about telling my kids how to do it. With humor, but I'll certainly tell them. I can imagine some young person newly out of the nest and trying desperately to get his electrical service connected, unable to get hold of a human being.

The world shouldn't be like this.

The liberal refusal to face implacable evil

On What's Wrong with the World I have a very brief post connecting part of the quotation below to Britain's refusal to admit Geert Wilders to the UK. The quotation fits very well in that context, but here I am giving it in full. It is a short capsule review by Lawrence Auster of a book by Ruth Wisse called If I am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews. Here is Auster's summary:

In this lucidly written, devastating anatomy of the liberal mind, Ruth Wisse shows how Jewish liberalism has weakened Jewish resolve in the face of Arab rejectionism and has unwittingly given anti-Semitism a new lease on life. Liberals cannot admit the existence of real evil, of an enemy beyond the reach of reason, of an unappeasable Other. The result is a fatal collusion "between the aggressor, who wants to conceal his intention in order to execute it effectively, and the liberal fundamentalist, who has to deny aggression so that he can continue to believe that humans were created in his image." Thus liberals, grown weary of opposing an unrelenting and unreasoning Arab rejectionism, have concluded that the cause of anti-Semitism must be Israel's own behavior. Beyond its immediate focus on the Jews, the larger interest of this book lies in what it has to say about liberalism--namely about the inability of liberals to oppose the forces of evil that would destroy the nations of the West.

I've not read the Wisse book, but it makes me want to go right out and do so. What I do not say in the W4 post (because I was making a different connection) is that this same problem bedevils Israel itself. The reason Israel is so infuriating for her hawkish supporters, like me, is because there are all too many Israelis who have this very problem: Despite the overwhelming evidence of the existence of an "unappeasable Other" in the form of the "Palestinians," not enough Israelis are willing to give up the sham of the "peace process." Partly this is America's fault, as President after President, including (shamefully) President Bush, insists on the continued pretense that there is some point to "negotiations" and that the former PLO (of all things) is a "peace partner" for Israel. This dangerous and suicidal rubbish never ends, and because Israel is too dependent on the good will of the U.S., they never tell us to go jump in the lake. But make no mistake: They have their own internal liberals who meet the above description to a T and who hate the truth-speaking Right in their own country.

And Western nations do something similar with respect to their immigrant Muslim population.

Milton Friedman on Capitalism: Donahue gets more than he bargained for

This is great. Friedman makes some excellent points. Donahue's loaded questions are posed as if there is some actual alternative polity under consideration that directly encourages virtue and is based on high-minded ideals. Friedman exposes Donahue's assumptions by going on the attack rather than playing defense. And he never misses a beat. Even the audience, likely inclined to favor Donahue, cannot help laughing.

And now for some shmaltz

Or is that "schmaltz"? I'm too lazy to go look it up. The one and only Julie Andrews and "Our Love is Here To Stay."

Audio of me on the radio

The audio is now up of my interview last night (Feb. 1) on the James Allen Show in Phoenix. Go here and choose the top item in the audio archives. I come in at about 4 minutes, I'm told. The commercials are still in there, so you can try to slide through those.

Bill Luse points out to me that I should have mentioned that my writing on the subject of religion in the public square is best exemplified by my article in The Christendom Review. That was in fact why I suggested the topic to James Allen when he made contact with me about being on. He's quite right. I should have put it into my notes for the interview.

Editor of What's Wrong with the World Paul Cella has absolved me for mispronouncing his name. The C is soft rather than Italianate.

James Allen did an excellent job as an interviewer. I had a lot of fun doing the interview, and if you have some time, you may enjoy listening to it.

Songs to Die For--"If Heaven"

I know nothing about country music, but I just heard this song for the first time at Stony Creek Digest, the blog of my cyber-friend Jeff Culbreath. "If Heaven," by Andy Griggs.



I note the allusion to "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes"--"If heaven was a tear, it'd be my last one."

My "Songs to Die For" series started here, with "Poor, Wayfarin' Stranger," almost a year and a half ago now. They don't have their own label. I probably should give them one, but for now they are scattered among the "hymns" and "songs that are not hymns" label. They are (almost) all songs related to death or heaven.

"If Heaven" has several unexpectedly profound things in it. For example, there is the verse that begins, "If Heaven was a pie it would be cherry," which hardly seems like a promising beginning. But then there is this line: "And just one bite would satisfy your hunger/And there'd always be enough for everyone." Which reminded Eldest Daughter, when she heard it, of the following section of Dante:

"It is because your desires are fixed where the part is lessened by sharing that envy blows the bellows to your sighs; but if the love of the highest sphere bent upward your longing, that fear would not be in your breast. For there, the more they are who say ours, the more of good does each possess and the more of charity burns in that cloister....That infinite and unspeakable good which is there above speeds to love as a sunbeam comes to a bright body; so much it gives of itself as it finds of ardour, so that the more charity extends the more does the eternal goodness increase upon it, and the more souls that are enamoured there above the more there are to be rightly loved and the more love there is and like a mirror the one returns it to the other." (Purgatorio, XV, 49ff, Virgil to Dante when they leave the terrace of the purgation of envy)

Or as Augustine says, "Truth ravishes all her lovers, yet is faithful to each."

I've just finished reading The Last Battle to Youngest Daughter, so heaven has been on my mind a good deal. When "If Heaven" connects heaven with earthly joys--finding the people you love alive, your home town, the best memories of childhood--I am reminded of this passage in The Last Battle. Professor Digory is speaking first:

"You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream."...It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right forehoof on the ground and neighed and then cried: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."

Like, and yet unlike, the joys of this earth. As Lewis says in The Great Divorce, everything good that dies will be resurrected, but it must die first.

Oh, and while we're at it, when I put up my post last year on B. J. Thomas's "Home Where I Belong," it was not available on Youtube (or I didn't know how to find it). But it is now. And so as a bonus, here it is, too.



I wish they could play that one at my funeral.

Hebrews 11:13-16, "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off...and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country...But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly, wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city."

Here's something really funny

I want to announce that next week, February 1, I will be interviewed on the James Allen Show, a talk radio show out of Phoenix, AZ, on religion in the public square and, to some extent, reason and faith. The show goes from 8-9 p.m. Phoenix time. The "What time is it" web site tells me that this should be 10-11 p.m. Michigan time. I'm supposed to be on starting at about 8:15 Phoenix time. Readers, please tell me if I'm missing something here about the time, as I want to be sure to call in at the right time. I've never done anything like this before and am rather nervous about it, but I think Mr. Allen has some good questions planned.

He sent me, for fun, some mock commercials his show had produced, and he kindly gave me permission to put up a link to this one. It hasn't been aired yet, as far as I know, and it is very funny. It spoofs the campaign of a Republican Presidential primary candidate whose initials are R. P. and whose name rhymes with "Don Ball." If any of you are wondering about my precautions in naming this person, they arise from the fact that during the primary this candidate's rather creepy followers (who are his worst enemies, in my opinion), had Google set to notify them whenever his name appeared anywhere, however obscurely, on the web. They would then descend upon any such post like the proverbial wolf on the fold. And I don't want that to happen here.

I'm also posting this because, as Zippy will know from our economic debates, I'm somewhat sympathetic to criticisms of fiat money, and I wouldn't want it to be thought that I've lost my sense of humor. We've had a good laugh here at my house about the paper money bills with Paulian slogans hand written all over them, referred to in this commercial. Maybe you've seen the notes on the money, too.

So click on the link above and enjoy the commercial. And remember--resistance to the New World Order is futile...

Uneasy nights post on W4

I have few readers here who do not also read What's Wrong with the World, but for those few, I want to highlight my new post there called "For Uneasy Nights." It is my recommendation about how we should pray for Barack Obama.

I Am Excited

...about something this week. But it certainly isn't the inauguration of Barack Obama, that's for sure.

It's the commutation of the sentences of former border agents Ramos and Compean, which they received for shooting a drug dealer in the rear end. This commutation, after two years in federal prison, isn't justice for them, but it's better than their being left in prison for eight more years. News reports say that they will be in prison for a couple more months. I hope they stay safe.

Looking up legal docs

Update: Document found. Thanks to Jonathan Prejean, who directed me to LEXIS/NEXIS. Yeah, I know: Why didn't I check that myself first. Well, see, I've never done it before, and... It took a bit of searching even there, but I now have the entire text. An interesting document. It looks to me like the 2DCA was very reluctant to say that her death was not "imminent," and that this was why they referred it to the Supreme Court as a question. There is even an urgent little bit at the end where they ask the Supreme Court to hurry up and hear the case lest (heaven forbid) the person in question should die with feeding and hydration in place while waiting for the courts to "assert her right of privacy." In fact, that's exactly what did happen in this case. But it does contain the "err on the side of life" direction, for what it is worth.

**************************************************************
(Original post)

Not being a lawyer, I refer the following question to my sage readership. How can I get a copy of the actual text of the following appellate court opinion from Florida?

In re Guardianship of Browning, 543 So.2d 258 (Fla. 2d DCA 1989)

I rather fancy myself a rad Googler, but I've googled 'n' googled, and what I've come up with is the Florida Supreme Court opinion by the same name from 1990, here, and a summary of the 2DCA appellate court's opinion, here. It's at least mildly interesting that the summary of the 2DCA opinion says that it held that "a guardian of a patient who is incompetent but not in a permanent vegetative state, and who suffers from an incurable but not necessarily terminal condition, cannot terminate life-sustaining treatment and feeding by tube." The Supreme Court decision by the same name holds just the opposite. In fact, it concludes that a person's death is "imminent" if that person's death will be imminent if food and hydration are removed. Cute, huh? So all of us are "imminently" dying. One would normally conclude that the Florida Supreme Court had simply overturned the 2DCA on this point, yet the Supreme Court's decision is worded rather as an answer to a "question" which the 2DCA has referred to it. In fact, there's no reference in the Supreme Court's opinion at all to the fact (if the summary article is right) that it is coming to the opposite conclusion to that of the appellate court on a fairly important point. Just to make things a little more interesting, the appellate opinion is often quoted as stating that a proxy must "err on the side of life" when trying to decide what a ward's wishes would be regarding treatment (where "treatment" includes, perversely, food and water), but the Supreme Court decision neither affirms nor rejects this instruction. It doesn't mention it at all.

All of this makes me curious to see the full text of the appellate court's decision. Since Google has failed me, I'd like to know what to try next. Esteemed husband has a pretty good interlibrary loan service here at Big State University, but there is (as far as I'm aware) not an actual law library. Does one simply take the reference for the opinion to ILL and say, "Here, find me a copy of this, please"? Or is there some other database one can sign into to see it if one's university subscribes?

This is all for an article I'm working on that will be a restrospective of some of the legal issues surrounding the murder of Terri Schiavo.

Thanks to all you legal eagles in my readership for info.

"Little Jazz Bird" by Glad

And a big HT to reader Stuart for suggesting imeem as a source of Glad clips. I'd been looking all over Youtube for a good recording of "Little Jazz Bird," but with no luck. (I didn't like the ones that were there, and of course they didn't have Glad.) Here is Glad's. I hope Gershwin won't be turning in his grave if I say that this song is absolutely adorable. It would be a lot of fun if some professional child singer had recorded it long ago--like Shirley Temple or somebody. The imeem clip is only missing a little bit at the end.

Little Jazz Bird - GLAD

Break out the world's smallest violin

Okay, I know I'm blogging more often here than usual, but can you believe this garbage???

An AP news story headlined "5 Pirates Drown With Ransom Share," and it tries to drum up sympathy for the pirates. For crying out loud! I say, thank God there is poetic justice in the world after all. But here are some bits from the story:

Piracy is one of the few ways to make money in Somalia. Half the population is dependent on aid and a whole generation has grown up knowing nothing but war. A recent report by London's Chatham House think-tank said pirates raked in more than $30 million in ransoms last year.

Well, cry me a river. See, they can't do anything but take innocent hostages and demand ransom, because that's one of the few ways of making money in their country! Piracy: Main source of income in Somalia. I feel so sad for them.

Or how about this...

Abukar Haji, uncle of one of the dead pirates, blamed the naval surveillance for the accident that killed his pirate nephew Saturday.

"The boat the pirates were traveling in capsized because it was running at high speed because the pirates were afraid of an attack from the warships patrolling around," he said.

"There has been human and monetary loss but what makes us feel sad is that we don't still have the dead bodies of our relatives. Four are still missing and one washed up on the shore."

Pirate Daud Nure said three of the eight passengers had managed to swim to shore after the boat overturned in rough seas. He was not part of the pirate operation but knew those involved.

"Here in Haradhere the news is grim, relatives are looking for their dead," he said.

I just love that quote from "Pirate Daud Nure." As if "pirate" were just some normal appellation. But I suppose we should be glad that the AP is revealing its source. And we're supposed to feel so bad that those nasty, nasty warships caused the death of the poor pirates because they might be (shiff) chasing them. And this is "grim news." God forbid we should have a sense of justice. Maybe they should have interviewed the relatives of some of the hostages and asked them if they think this news is grim.

I'm pretty nearly speechless. This is outrageous. I know that if I read more AP news stories I'd see more outrageous stuff than this, but this is the one that I happened to see today.