After Vincas showed me how to dump a mysql database (Saturday-ish) and prodded me to write a script to edit the dates (Saturday and Sunday), I have now done so, deleted my tables (having googled the command), and set things back up with that edited dump file. Wow.

I used php to do it though, not the perl Vincas suggested. And I am quite sure there is a cleaner way to do it than the script I used, but it was functional. So now my posts are more or less in the right day (give or take gmt messiness), and displaying with the right time (IF you pretend daylights savings time never existed). Yay!

I was originally going to talk about this along with the previous set of articles, but today’s news caused me to re-think that. In retrospect, it is just as well I held off posting Friday, for while I would have handed the previous post better, I would not have done as well covering this topic.

Reading Ms. Kathleen Parker’s column,[1] my first thought was quite evidently not the same as hers. She relates the drive towards an artificial womb to the concept of a metrosexual (which is, according to her, quite common in France), and with the whole Michael Jackson mess. My first thought was that this is a critical piece of Mr. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We now live in a world where cloning happens, and that reality must inform our view of this sort of research. In the movie previews I have seen recently, is one for “The Island”[2] in which a group of people are kept isolated and alive for the sole purpose of someday killing them and harvesting their organs to keep others alive. The scary thing is that with this research, the technology to do this would nearly be here.[3]

Compounding this is the fact that you have Belgian scientists cloning embryos from egg cells,[4] and British scientists developing sperm and egg cells from stem cells.[5] We really do have all the pieces necessary to mass produce fatherless and motherless people. This is a horror that scientists will not stop, they will do this type of research, morally unacceptable as it is, unless stopped. Science is not self-regulating, else I would not be here writing about this.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/kathleenparker/kp20050615.shtml [2] http://imdb.com/title/tt0399201/ [3] The missing piece would be solving the sort of problems that plagued Dolly the cloned sheep. I do not know if this has been done or not, but given there is a firm that will clone a pet for you, I imagine it might well have been. [4] http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050620/sc_nm/health_fertility_dc_4 [5] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-06/esfh-hes061705.php

Talking about the sexualization of society in general, Mr. Ben Shapiro calls mine the “Porn Generation.”[1] Everyone knows that filth is readily available on the Internet. Anyone with an email address likely sees more of it than they want to. But to focus on the Internet really is to miss the bulk of what is going on in our culture. When you see the lawsuits that the ACLU starts, and as you watch the push for homosexual “marriages” the picture starts to become clearer though. Pervasive in many of the television shows (Mr. Shapiro uses “Friends” as an example), is the idea that you can have sex without cost or risk, and that promiscuity is normal and acceptable. The same message is sent as we teach ever younger grade schoolers about condoms and sex. The result is also ever clearer: we now have grade schoolers having sex parties.[2]

But not only are we funding sex ed for children, we are also funding sex itself.[3] No doubt those who use Viagra are thankful for it, but surely this is something more like cosmetic surgery than it is like an antibiotic. This goes back to the point Mr. Walter Williams was making (see my previous post), when we socialize things, we end up paying for things we never otherwise would. Here though, it goes far beyond seat belts. Here we are paying for the idea that sex is a need, and, implicitly, that it is not controlled by the will any more than any other bodily function. This reveals the root of the problem: we have mentally divorced sex from marriage and thus from procreation. Once we did that, we opened the door, just as Pope Paul VI predicted, to a whole host of other problems.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/bs20050615.shtml [2] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/mm20050526.shtml [3] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/js20050615.shtml

Mr. Walter Williams has an interesting take on insurance and laws like the one requiring you wear a seat belt.[1] In short, he lumps these in with socialism, and in a very real way he is right. The only sense in which these are justifiable is that in which people who are injured from their own recklessness become a burden on the public. But they would not be a burden on the public if the government were not taking care of them, that is, if socialism were not in place.

The exception to this is private insurance. Given private health and car insurance, you still become a burden on a subset of the public if you are reckless. That being said, private insurance also has a mechanism to deal with this. We charge higher premiums to smokers, and you could write in an exemption for seat belts, that is, you would not be covered if not wearing a seat belt. So I think that in the end, private insurance would compensate for the lack of social welfare laws, with much the same effect, if the socialism were scaled back.

[1] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/walterwilliams/ww20050615.shtml

Vincas once told me that the biggest thing holding back reunification with the Orthodox churches was the intransigence of the Russian Patriarch. Is that the same as the Ukrainian one? I am assuming not, as today I read that he is advocating working more closely with Rome.[1] I would love to see a reunification of the Orthodox churches to the Church. It would end some confusion, and as importantly, end centuries of people being lead astray by the schism.

[1] http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=4173