Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.
A Gray Peace Corps could be established that deploys the senior citizens in our aging society to spend periods in Africa, where they would alleviate the enormous shortages of skills that cripple African development. The possibilities are limitless.I think this is a fascinating, brilliant idea, and one that captures nicely the central insight of, of all things, this book, which came so highly recommended by Instapundit and Professor Bainbridge: that, when one has rough and difficult work to do, the experience of a life long-lived is at least as valuable as the energy and durability of youth.
Seems clear enough to me -- I mean, just look at it. What other way COULD it be pronounced?What other way indeed? I think we've stumbled onto a serious debate here.
similar to Brodie, but with the "t" sound kicking off the second syllableAs I said, it's a serious debate!
[McNollgast's approach] is enormously information demanding. If McNollgast mean [sic] to suggest that legislative history is reliable only when it can be deployed in this sophisticated fashion (using Bayesian decision theory in the bargain), they may have offered judges and administrators a tool that they cannot use.Now, you may not find that idea interesting, but I found it fascinating, and would like to learn more. Except. I'm not going to read an entire book about it. I simply don't have the time. (And yet, I have the time to blog. What a world.) But if there were a condensed version of it (an extended abstract, if you will) I could easily see myself making the time (half an hour, tops) to read that. And if I still wanted to learn more, or to find references I could follow to other sources, I'd get the whole book.
No; it's not about Terri Schiavo. And it hasn't been for quite awhile.Read the whole thing. (via Amy Welborn)
It's about us.
It's about each of us who thinks "I wouldn't want to live if I were a vegetable." It's about each one of us who thinks, as one blogger wrote, that Michael Schiavo has been "chained to a drooling shitbag for 15 years."
But it's also about those of us who are those vegetables, those drooling shitbags. Those of us who want to live but know we're a burden to our families. Those of us who fear "do not resuscitate" orders. Those of us who use ventilators, and who use feeding tubes. And those of us who can communicate with clarity only through artificial means.
HOLIDAY ISLAND is a golf and lake resort community that sits on the shoreline of a 53-mile long lake with 800 miles of shoreline to explore. With 27 holes of challenging golf and many other amenities, this community is located in Northwest Arkansas, the 6th fastest growing region in the US. Forbes ranked Northwest Arkansas #23 for "Best Places For Business and Career". I think you will see that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity you will not want to miss!I immediately thought: Knotheads!
After all, hers is hardly the first "food and fluids" case to have bitterly divided a family, and it won't be the last. Nor is it at all uncommon in America for patients who are Terri's age and younger to be deprived of food and water so that they will die, even when there is doubt about what they would choose in such circumstances, and even though they are neither brain dead nor terminally ill.A couple websites with not enough money to pay their bandwidth fees; an enterprising, almost monomaniacal priest from a diocese 1,000 miles away; a diffuse network of Catholic and Evangelical bloggers: an unlikely cadre to force a national debate, to pull Congress out of recess, and, perhaps, to unsettle "end of life" issues the elite had thought settled.
Terri's putative husband (he started a new family in the mid-1990s) isn't the first spouse to fight in court with in-laws over the removal of a feeding tube. Two cases in the 1990s were strikingly similar, albeit the courts ruled in favor of life. Both Michael Martin of Michigan and Robert Wendland of California were unquestionably conscious when their wives fought nasty, protracted court battles through trial, appeal, and final decision by state supreme courts to see them die. Michael Martin had allegedly expressed a desire to live to an examining doctor using a facilitated communication device; Robert Wendland could roll a wheelchair down a hospital corridor. Both cases made the news, yet neither consumed the entire country or caused the deep societal divisions that Terri's case has generated.
This controversy hit the stratosphere, I believe, because of one simple but very powerful innovation: the Internet. When the Michael Martin and Robert Wendland families fought almost identical battles in the 1990s, the Internet, especially as a source of news, was still in its infancy. It was difficult to spread facts or perspectives that the mainstream media did not want to present--and the reporting of those cases was as skewed and one-sided in favor of death as has been the coverage of Terri Schiavo.
Moreover, and I think more important, the guardian-spouses maintained tight control over the images of their husbands. Almost every contemporary picture of Robert Wendland and Michael Martin that was made public was one that Mary Martin and Rose Wendland's lawyers wanted to be seen. While the parents were telling the world that their sons were responsive and aware, the approved photographs and videos generally depicted them as nonresponsive. Indeed, when despite this tight control a San Francisco television program managed to air an "unapproved" video that showed Wendland taking pegs from a board and replacing them during a therapy session, lawyers for Lodi Memorial Hospital--whose spokeswoman had claimed incorrectly that Robert was as good as comatose--sought (unsuccessfully) to have a gag order imposed in the case.
By the time the Schiavo litigation came along, the Internet was booming and becoming ever more sophisticated. Ordinary users had the technical means to view videos uploaded onto websites. Knowing that cases such as these are often won and lost in the sphere of public relations, Terri's parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, and their supporters created a website, terrisfight.org, which carried news of the case, copies of court documents, the story of Terri's life, and most crucially, powerful videos of Terri Schiavo apparently reacting to the world around her.
In one scene, Terri is asked by a doctor to open her eyes. For a moment; nothing. Then, Terri's eyes flutter and she opens them. She seems to be so eager to please--and this really touched my heart when I first saw it--that she opens her eyes so wide her forehead wrinkles.
In another scene, Terri's mother comes into the room. She talks happily to her daughter, "Hi! Hi, it's Mommy. How are you?" As Mary Schindler adjusts Terri on the bed, it sure looks as if she recognizes her mother, and she smiles happily. In a third scene Terri appears to respond happily when music is turned on. And so it goes.
These videos made all of the difference. Rather than being an abstract "vegetable" (a truly loathsome word to describe any human being), Terri came to be seen as a real person, obviously alive, and fully human. Michael Schiavo's supporters and proponents of Terri's dehydration within the bioethics community stomped and fussed, insisting that the appearance of interactivity in the videos were actually just reflexes. But many viewers saw these complaints as being akin to the cheating husband who tells his wife after she has caught him in flagrante delicto: "Who are you going to believe--me, or your lying eyes?" The videos told a different story than that of a supposedly vegetative woman unable to interact with others. And for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, the real Terri came out of the shadows, a sub-human no more.
In the wake of the Terri Schiavo ordeal, we are now treated to published accounts of children recalling how they denied their own parents nutrition. "Defining deviancy down" was the phrase coined by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to describe a society that had lost its moral compass and lowered its capacity for outrage. The phrase seems perfect to describe the middle- and upper-middle-class children who have surfaced to boast of how they ended their parents' lives--as if it had been somehow an act of valor. It is also a chillingly apt description of a society that, in the name of the law, forces a young woman to die of thirst and to starve even as we watch.The commonality of this practice simply makes it a more vicious and tenacious foe; it does not, and can never, make it right.
Compared to the responsibilities facing Congress -- a war, a budget deficit, Social Security reform, and more -- the Schiavo case isn't very important.You won't be surprised to discover that I disagree.
Opposition to the Florida court's ruling seems like a legitimate protest against what appears to be a disingenuous machinery of euthanasia lawyers are busy establishing under the guise of a "right to die" (a right Terry Schiavo can only be said to be exercising by an extremely suspect chain of reasoning). ... Our society is going to have to have this out at some point--why not now? And why isn't it a perfectly reasonable issue for the national legislature to address?Question of how we treat the dying and the severely disabled - should we allow euthanasia? Active or passive? Voluntary or involuntary? - ultimately implicate much deeper questions about what it means to be human, and a person, (and if those are separable things). Are we just our cerebral cortices? Does human freedom include the freedom to obliterate one's self? Is human dignity an inherent or an accidental characteristic? Is death preferable to a life full of suffering? To a life of severe, and perhaps humiliating disability? What duties do the strong owe the weak?
Humanitarian Workers at Risk
Last week, the United Nations was forced to withdraw its staff from parts of western Sudan after the Janjaweed militia declared that it would begin targeting foreigners and U.N. humanitarian convoys.
Yesterday, a 26 year-old USAID worker was shot in the face when the clearly-marked humanitarian convoy she was traveling in was ambushed in broad daylight.
It is still unknown just who carried out this ambush, but Sudan expert Eric Reeves reported yesterday that he had "received from multiple, highly authoritative sources intelligence indicating that Khartoum has ambitious plans for accelerating the obstruction of humanitarian access by means of orchestrated violence and insecurity, including the use of targeted violence against humanitarian aid workers."
If such a plan is truly in the works, it will have dire consequences for the people of Darfur. Last year, Jan Egeland, the UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, warned that as many as 100,000 people could die in Darfur every month if those providing humanitarian assistance were forced to withdraw due to insecurity.
Save the Children has already lost 4 of its aid workers in the last year, yet they continue to provide medical care, food, water, shelter, and protection to more than 200,000 children and families in Darfur each month.
The members of the Coalition for Darfur are working together to raise money for Save the Children and if each coalition partner can raise a mere $10 dollars a week, together we can generate $2,000 a month to support Save the Children's life saving work.
We hope that you might consider making a small donation.
In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.I'm not sure what the legal standard is for justifying treating disabled/non-disabled people differently in a non-accomodation situation under the ADA, but surely it's not nothing.
A new poll showing that Catholics are backing off support for the death penalty was no surprise to U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, an outspoken conservative Catholic, who says he has been re-examining his own view.(via the Corner)
He has not become an abolitionist, and he believes church teaching against the death penalty carries less weight than its longer-standing opposition to abortion. But he questions what he once unquestioningly supported.
Enthusiastic dissenters often make themselves blind to the sole remedy for the scrupulous, since strict following of a legitimate, trustworthy authority is tainted with "paternalism," slavish obedience to "the hierarchy," etc. etc. in their minds. Therefore, the best remedy for the scrupulous in their opinion is to just "get over" the small details in the moral law and "live & love" however seems best. Of course, this advice is at best useless for the scrupulous. Elsewhere Ciarrocchi mentions a study which demonstrates that the best way to reinforce obsessive patterns of behavior is to tell the OCD patient to try not to think about those behaviors for a while. He inevitably fails, and when his former ways of thinking return, they do so with a vengeance. So too then, when one tells a scrupulous person to just "live and love."Especially for those of use who lack wisdom, treading the line between being scrupulous and being dangerously cavalier about sin is a difficult one. In an age that laughs at the existence of sin, it's all too easy to say, "Eh, no big deal," at small sins; but it's also easy to swing too far in the opposite direction, and to assume that everything's a mortal sin.
[...]
The diametrical opposition of scrupulosity and dissent also explain why your typical liberal confessor accuses you of being scrupulous when you are merely obeying the letter of the law in small matters, such as the Eucharistic fast, or if you appear in confession "too frequently," which for many means more than once a month. To a profligate, chastity seems prudish. To a drunk, moderation in drink seems abstemtious. To a dissenter, obedience in small matters seems scrupulous.
(3) There is clear and convincing evidence that the incompetent person, when competent, gave express and informed consent to withdrawing or withholding nutrition or hydration in the applicable circumstances.That's a permanent solution to the problem, one that will, almost certainly, result in Terri continuing to receive food and water.
But the LORD is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph. In their failure they will be put to utter shame, to lasting, unforgettable confusion. Jeremiah 20:11By the way, when they told her what was about to happen, Terri cried.
The implicit message this daughter learned growing up is that "when bad things happen, this family does not recover".
How would a daughter absorb this message?
It could be that the parent's marriage is not satisfying, and the parents individually and collectively feel a sense of hopelessness about this. The marriage sinks into torpor, or uglinesses. Grace seems to be absent.
It could be that some tragedies or unfortunate events befell the family when the daughter was growing up, and the family projects a sense of never having recovered from this tragedy. (The tragedy could be an illness of an older sibling, a divorce, sexual molestation somewhere in the family, bankruptcy, and many other unfortunate or tragic events.)
Sometimes when I hear about a family like this, the family sounds like a once-grand mansion that has gradually sunk into disrepair and unkemptness, with broken windows, weeds in the garden, and so on.
In a family like this, there is often a sense of a before and an after. There's a time when things felt golden in the family (at least relatively speaking) and after a specific event or series of events happened, things became gray and the golden age is a distant painful memory.
"In this job you've got a lot on your plate on a regular basis; you don't have much time to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, 'How do you think my standing will be?'" — Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005Volokh's argument is basically that people make minor missteps in their off-the-cuff remarks all the time, and that the "Bushism" feature, if it were ever funny, is now pointless and cruel.
**Exclusive Fri Mar 18 2005 00:50:07 ET** The Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committee, Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming) has requested Terri Schiavo to testify before his congressional committee, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. In so doing it triggers legal or statutory protections for the witness, among those protections is that nothing can be done to cause harm or death to this individual.She's not just a human being, she's under subpoena!
Members of Congress went to the U.S. Attorney in DC to ask for a temporary restraining order to be issued by a judge, which protects Terri Schiavo from having her life support, including her feeding and hydration tubes, removed... Developing...
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