Inconvenient questions...

From 30,000 ft, some inconvenient questions I've heard asked... or asked myself:

Stephen Hawking

• Total gomer, hopeless, doomed to get worse, can't survive without extraordinary intervention, icky. Let him die with dignity! Withhold food and water! Dignity uber alles!

Partial Birth Abortion

• "Fetus" lacks personhood. Dependent; parasitic even. Go ahead, poke a hole into its skull, suck its brains out and dismember it. What could possibly be "bad" about that? It's a choice, after all. Or would it be better--more humane, more natural--to lay it on a table and withhold food and water until it stops twitching and wailing? Should hospitals be equipped with soundproof drawers for such purpose?

Withholding food and water

• Merely facilitates the natural course of death. But why not tie a dry-cleaner bag over their head? How is "withholding" air any different? Or, I've heard of drowning kittens in a cage... isn't that the same thing?


• If it's humane and natural, why not use it as a means for judicial execution, or for hopelessly ill or injured animals?


• Why not extend the practice to the severely mentally retarded? There is no cure for Down Syndrome, after all. No hope whatsoever. These people (excuse me, "people") can't reason or provide for themselves. Withhold food and water-- end of problem, for them and for us!


• What about hopelessly ill or unwanted children? Being children, they lack reasoning capability or the ability to make mature decisions. Granted, they "interact" at a simplistic level; for example, a baby might smile when you tickle it, or cry when you pinch it, but these are clearly just mindless reflexes and not indicative of higher cortical function. Shouldn't their guardians have the right to make critical decisions for them? If they judge a child to be hopeless or unwanted, shouldn't food and water be withheld? What right does the state have to interfere?


• Peter Singer, the eminent Princeton ethicist, says that a woman's right to choose should extend for 28 days after birth or even longer. Senator Barbara Boxer has said a week would certainly make sense. Are they correct? If so, is withholding food and water a humane and natural way of expressing this choice?


• I read of a woman, a self-described dog-lover, who would regularly take her dogs in to be euthanized on their fifth birthday so that they wouldn't grow old and suffer a decline from their prime. Was she right? Instead of euthanasia by injection, what about withholding food and water?

...I'm just trying to figure out where the lines are drawn...

What made another Airbus rudder snap in mid-air?

When Flight 961 literally began to fall apart at 35,000 feet, it increased fears of a fatal design flaw in the world's most popular passenger jet

At 35,000 feet above the Caribbean, Air Transat flight 961 was heading home to Quebec with 270 passengers and crew. At 3.45 pm last Sunday, the pilot noticed something very unusual. His Airbus A310's rudder - a structure 28 feet high - had fallen off and tumbled into the sea. In the world of aviation, the shock waves have yet to subside...

As Billy Beck blogged,

I really very much don't like the look of this.

You know what else I don't like? The fact that this story was a week old before I heard it.

What the hell's up with that?

...Allow me a little speculation here. What might be up with that could be hinted-at in the Guardian article's subhead, italicized above. See, the commercial aviation market is still gasping on the mat after 9/11 compounded three decades of mismanagement and union avarice. And in the middle of those decades, at the precise moment the dollar/euro exchange rate was at its most cantilevered, came Airbus with free money and cheap, heavily-subsidized airplanes. Voila, as that subhead alludes: "the world's most popular passenger jet".

So along comes 9/11, then hot on its heels comes AA587: The tail falls off; the engines fall off; even the little "Made in France" sticker falls off, and people die. Continuing with my speculation: given that it would've finished air transportation right off to ground the Airbus, the twitchy-footed pilot was made a convenient scapegoat by the accident review board; meanwhile a program of visual inspection of the planes' composite tailfins was quietly mandated.

Trouble is, visual inspection doesn't tell you much about the health of a composite structure. Only costly and frequent ultrasonic, vibrometric or holographic inspection of the detached panels would do that... sometimes. To my eye, the situation is compounded by Airbus' design decision not to use metal structural spars in the panels to distribute shear forces through the composite structure. So when these panels failed, they broke cleanly away from their unreinforced attachment grommets: compare photos of the consistent damage in this latest airplane's fractured tail with the postmortem pictures of AA587's carcass.

What we might be looking at is the chilling leading-edge of a hockey-stick trend of structural failure in Airbus' composite tails. Scary stuff indeed. And scariest of all, if so: how many more hundreds of souls must perish before regulators ground the Airbus? And what happens to commercial aviation and the economy when they do?

Slate: The Hassle Factor - But I don't want to manage my own Social Security account!

Now here's something truly disgusting. Executive summary: according to this Slate pundit, we should leave alone the creaking, crumbling Ponzi scheme known as Social Security, forcing generation after generation to toss an ever-expanding share of its wages down the rat-hole of collectivism, leaving bupkes for their children to inherit and earning a rate of return that would get any financial manager fired for incompetence or arrested for fraud. And we should do this because the alternative--actual ownership of one's own retirement account--is too much work for some people. Let alone that there are simple passbook-style accounts that would do the job for them and still earn a substantial multiple of Social Security's returns and leave a tidy sum to pass on to one's heirs-- no, you and I and everyone else should be forced to endure the current system because a few people are lame and lazy and want a Federal nanny to tuck them in at night.

"...Millions of Americans, I'm convinced, are against [Bush's Social Security reform proposals] for only [one] reason. We don't want to have to think about Social Security. 'But people worry about it now,' you might say. Oh, sure, at these presidential drop-in discussions in Fargo, N.D., a cop or cook will say, 'I worry Social Security won't be there for me.' But come on, they don't really worry. If they did, they'd open a damned savings account.

In real life, we ignore our Social Security. That's the glory of it. We have the freedom not to think about it. With all the time I have not to think about my 'private' account, I can turn on the Cubs game. Or open up Kafka.

I can even pray, if I want.

Privatization is one more damn thing to distract and upset me..."

The answer to this infuriating mental midgetry is so simple I'm surprised no conservative or libertarian pundits have picked up on it. I've already mentioned it: under Social Security, when you die your Social Security account dies with you. Your kids inherit nothing. And there's the key to selling Bush's reform: Let's do it for the children. Won't somebody please think of the children?

Winston-Salem Journal | Senator wants cable, satellite TV subject to indecency rules

"...Viewers do not differentiate between traditional TV and cable, so they do not know when they might be exposed to objectionable programming... In this country, there has to be some standards of decency..."

In other words, people are too stupid to operate their own TV remote-control and need the Federal nanny-state to do it for them.

And, notice that the theory no longer goes to ensuring the orderly use of finite spectrum, but to protecting viewers from objectionable content on systems which have no spectral limitations. There is zero Constitutional authority granted for such purposes!

I'm embarrassed this guy's a Republican. Once the GOP was the party of limited government...