Hello, sailor!

Take note that, certain reports notwithstanding, the military is not quite ready to decriminalize sodomy. Somebody better tell Churchill.

Intermission

This portion of the program brought to you by all of Christendom, which is threatening to move, in entirety, to South Carolina.

This week's deconstruction

As mentioned on these pages before, Puddinhead is a scientist. It's becoming increasingly obvious [to him, anyways] that so much voting and legislation regarding sciences, particularly the biological ones, are done by the laiety who don't necessarily know what they're talking about. One peril of liberalism these days is the anti-intellectual streak permeating popular culture - hey, it's been with us since Adlai Stevenson. Of course, so has the odd liberal sense that the group is nobly losing, and that as a collective it's getting cut down in battle. In terms of cultural mythology, this is a sort of interesting tack to follow. Unfortunately, we have slightly more pressing matters these days. It is certainly some hubris that accompanies this desire for change - I mean, we're right, aren't we? - that makes it a bit difficult for the self-aware to parse out ego from the demonstrably factual. That's part of the Hamlet idea, no? That it's noble to struggle with self-doubt? By and large, any self-doubt that tortures conservatives is done in private, where it takes such extremes as to be baffling when exposed to the light of day.

Shit, look at even me. I just blew a paragraph handwringing about seeming too arrogant because I think that facts ought to be considered when writing legislation.

Fuck that shit.

Where were we? Ah yes: one of Puddin's colleagues puts it, "More people in this country believe in the virgin birth than believe in evolution."

So let's examine some of the actual science, and underreported facts, behind recent legislative decisions. Today's topic will be stem cell research.

We'll examine some of the promises and blind alleys offered by working with these cell types below. However, the first thing that needs addressing is the conservative rationale for preventing the research. Here's Bush's statement on the matter. For some context, he's talking about how one derives stem cell lines from human embryos. Below, I've highlighted a few passages, emphasis mine:

When doctors match sperm and egg to create life outside the womb, they usually produce more embryos than are planted in the mother. Once a couple successfully has children, or if they are unsuccessful, the additional embryos remain frozen in laboratories. Some will not survive during long storage; others are destroyed.
...
As I thought through this issue, I kept returning to two fundamental questions: First, are these frozen embryos human life, and therefore, something precious to be protected? And second, if they're going to be destroyed anyway, shouldn't they be used for a greater good, for research that has the potential to save and improve other lives?
...
As a result of private research, more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist. They were created from embryos that have already been destroyed, and they have the ability to regenerate themselves indefinitely, creating ongoing opportunities for research. I have concluded that we should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines, where the life and death decision has already been made.

The way in vitro fertilization works, as Bush says, is by fertilizing human eggs from a woman with sperm from a man in a dish. This fusing of two cells divides a few times, just like it would if it were the result of these two cells meeting under more hospitable circumstances [i.e., a womb]. When I say "a few times", I mean 2 or 3 times, for a total of eight cells. When IVF specialists do this for a couple seeking a baby, they tend to collect about seven oocytes, or eggs, and they fertilize them all. To increase chances of implantation [these things don't always take], they tend to put 2-4 embryos into the womb. This means the rate of multiple births in women undergoing IVF shoots through the roof [about 25% of these births produce twins]. Most of this is spelled out in the information page of any fertility clinic you care to visit: try here, here, or here.

However, those of you astute enough to do the math will note that if a woman has seven oocytes fertilized and four of them implanted, three go someplace else. In simple language, the IVF clinics tell you where [this one's from here]:

Q: What happens to any extra pre-embryos?

A: A maximum of four pre-embryos will be transferred to the uterus for possible implantation. Patients will have several other options regarding the disposition of the remaining pre-embryos. One option is to freeze pre-embryos for your later use. Other options are to donate or simply dispose of them. Excess pre-embryos, if any, belong to you, and you will determine what is to be done.

Read that? You can do whatever you want to with them. Except donate them in the hopes of curing disease.

Here's where it gets sketchy. Reread Bush's comments. He acknowledges that some of these things are being thrown out, but sort of glosses over it, and instead implies that these days, there won't be any more destruction of innocent embryos. However, it happens all the time. Every day. If you don't want to fill up racks and racks of freezer space at the clinic, you just thaw those four or eight cells out and pour 'em down the sink. If Bush were really after not letting embryos die, don't you think he'd, say, try to make it illegal for fertility clinics to dispose of the eggs? He won't, of course. Then we'd have thousands and thousands of embryos in freezers, waiting for some selfless woman to implant a stranger's baby in her womb.

Instead, Bush's administration allows federal dollars to pay for your IVF treatments, and the subsequent destruction of those embryos should you decide to take that path.

So is the President serious about this culture of life business? Not at all, at least in regards to stem cell research. While these statements of moral weight were made back in 2001, when the country had less serious matters to fret over, we should still recognize that potentially lifesaving research is being profoundly hampered in this country.

Is it potentially lifesaving? How would all this stuff work? I'll address that next post.

Somehow, I've always known

Communications jamming devices hidden under the floorboards at the Vatican.

History repeating isself

There are a lot of criticisms of George W. Bush. Here, read some salient examples, plucked from various news sources [culled by the inestimable Paul Slansky]:

"He was as vapid student as I can ever recall ... Nothing came out of his mouth that was worth remembering."

- Political science prof Robert Sedlack

On the domestic front, he declares that Republicans "understand the importance of bondage between parent and child," though, of course, he means "bonding".

- Paul Slansky

"A boisterous speaker whose face turns red and arms flap wildly when he gets excited about the issue being debated ... Frequently talks at length about issues whether he completely understands them or not."

- Sara Fritz/Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times

"There's something chilling about a hawk on defense who pronounces the word 'nuclear' as 'nucular.'"

- David Gritten, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Sound familiar? Of course. You could probably have made these quotes up in your head and still gotten them correct. However, there's one thing not quite right here: each one of those quotes refers not to President George W. Bush, but to former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle.

The parallels between Bush the younger and Quayle are striking. As you've probably read, Bush was a mediocre student, a drunk, received preferential treatment in order to avoid the Vietnam war, and traded on family connections his entire life. Precisely the same can be said of Quayle at every step. Quayle was a terrible student and a drunk at DePauw, just as Bush was a loutish Yalie cheerleader. Both enjoyed interventions on their behalf from politically-connected parents to avoid dangerous wartime service, both were let into professional school under the radar through affirmative action programs, and both consistently failed at their efforts at actual business and required constant bailing out. Even while in office, both men crowed on defense after their ignominious histories of shoddy service, praised the self-made despite their own dependency on highly-placed others, stumbled with language ["bondage" vs. "subliminable"] and had their images boosted mostly with media-savvy handlers despite their own efforts and antics.

Indeed, so strikingly similar are these men that Puddin sometimes has to wonder: Did George H. W. Bush, the 41st President, actually have a grander scheme in mind when he picked Quayle? It is almost as if Bush pere suspected that one day his chump son might want to run for higher office, and he picked somebody just like him to be Vice President to see if it could be done.

Keep paying attention to these two men. It's not like Quayle is in the news these days, so you'll have to rely on your own memory and whatever other resources you can dig up. Of course, Quayle obtained such a reputation for being so thick that some quotes attributed to him are apocryphal. Disregard those for the greater story: aren't Quayle and Bush II astonishingly similar? Why might that be?

Today's addition to our idiom

There's an article in today's New York Times detailing an interesting, if little-enforced, law that exempts servicemen from financial obligations [e.g., mortgages] while they're in active duty. Makes sense. A substantial number of them are getting screwed, because creditors from non-military towns don't know anything about the law and are going around foreclosing everything. It's a shame. However, the silver lining here is that one of the military lawyers involved evoked the most brilliant idiom ever, which I'm sure made the Times reporter squeal with delight:

But these efforts are not enough, said Col. John S. Odom Jr., retired, of Shreveport, La., who is a specialist on the act. "What we need is a way to reach Joe Bagadoughnuts in Wherever, Louisiana," he said. "Because that's where these cases are turning up."

Joe Sixpack, I believe we've found your rightful heir.

In case you might be harboring any doubts

From today's New York Times (emphasis mine):

Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist and medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has examined Ms. Schiavo on behalf of the Florida courts and declared her to be irredeemably brain-damaged, said ... there was no doubt that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. "Her CAT scan shows massive shrinkage of the brain," he said. "Her EEG is flat - flat. There's no electrical activity coming from her brain."

Here's how an EEG works.

Any questions?