| Sunday,
February 27, 2005
An alarming story from Kentucky
Subject: Even S.F. writers are not safe...
http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=2989614
I wish only that the actual subversive writings were
posted somewhere, so we would all know what not to write in Kentucky.
--Christian J. Schulte
Best to write nothing at all. Safer that
way.
This is frightening but not surprising.
==========
Papers, please
"He's unable to travel because he refuses to present a
government-approved ID"
http://www.postgazette.com/pg/05058/462446.stm
David P.
Even more important is a secret law. The
Plebs made the Patricians write down the laws so all could see them. Now we
have secret laws again. This is frightening but not surprising.
==========
Dr. Pournelle,
This is interesting.
www.tenbyten.org/10x10.html
. It takes the top 100 news articles online and automatically creates a
10x10 grid of images from those articles. Supposedly it's automated and
unbiased. Without seeing the code and lists of sources it's only as
believable as anything else on the intardnet, but it's still interesting.
Sean Long
Very.
=====
Subject: Surprise, surprise.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56474-2005Feb26.html
-- Roland Dobbins
=====
I have a fair amount
of mail on the Schiavo case. I don't care to have it dominate next week.
Here are some representative letters:
Subject: Terri Schiavo
From newspaper accounts, her "chemical imbalance" was
hypokalemia, a dangerously low level of potassium. According to those
accounts, Mrs. Schiavo had previously had a weight problem for many years
and was deathly afraid of becoming fat again. She had been starving herself,
eating very little real food but drinking lots of watery drinks. That washed
the potassium out of her body, which stopped her heart. Alas, some bastards
came along after a few minutes, when the important parts of her brain were
dead but the brainstem was mostly revivable, and they "saved" her.
I find it hard to get worked up over Mrs. Schiavo. For
one thing, her "life" has only been strung out this long because of
malpractice insurance money. She went to doctors with the complaint of
missing menstrual periods. (Starvation--go figure.) Naturally she forgot to
mention that she drank many glasses of tea every day and ate an absurd
liquid diet. Completely slipped her mind, I'd imagine. The courts apparently
found that the proper procedure for that complaint is to instantaneously
throw every chemical test at the patient. As we are all no doubt aware,
menstrual irregularities are a dire medical emergency.
For another thing, you have to draw the line
somewhere, and the difference between passive and active killing seems to be
a pretty good place. They stop using extraordinary technology to keep her
body going, and it does whatever it does. Maybe she dies, and maybe the
horse learns to sing. In any event, this is her botched suicide and whatever
part of her is left to complain has no cause.
-- DN
====
I cannot help but find your posting on this to be
totally callous. Michael Schiavo is following his wife’s oral request that
she not be kept alive by machines. Obviously she left no written record or a
DNR statement in a will, but I believe that her desire was not to be kept
alive artificially.
My father-in-law was kept alive by a hospital for 1
year after a major stroke left him in more or less a similar state. He was
in a coma unable to communicate and showed no signs of recognition. I cannot
believe that this was his wish. However since he left no written statement
to the contrary, the Medical Machine (hospitals) were able to keep him
“alive” via machines until he suffered an additional stroke and mercifully,
died. You cannot imagine incredible emotional state his family went through
watching him suffer a living agony.
My wife and I have discussed this, and neither of us
wish to be kept alive artificially if there is no hope of recovery. I trust
her to follow my wishes, and I know she trusts me to do the same.
The Schindler’s (parents) are clinging to the forlorn
hope that there is a chance of recovery even though Doctors have equivocally
stated that there is no hope of recovery. They have, I feel, abused the
legal system and legislature in Florida to prolong her daughter’s agony,
without any regard for her stated wishes. The Governor of Florida and the
legislature attempted to intervene in an area which was not their concern
purely for personal political gain.
The Schindler’s statement yesterday, "I don't see it
as a victory, the victory is when we take Terri home and we get her therapy,
“ indicates to me that they feel the medical malpractice award which is
pending should be theirs not their daughters shows me how callous they have
become in the name of religion.
Ask yourself how you would feel if kept alive
artificially? Tubes down your throat pumping air and nutrients into a body
which has lost all independent functioning. How would you like it? How could
you put your family through the agony of watching you suffer and wither
away?
Which entirely begs all the questions. I
hadn't thought anyone was questioning the validity of living wills.
When it comes to unwitnessed expressions of intent, I would have thought it
a different matter. As to the rest, might others come to different
conclusions about the motives of those involved?
Who gets to decide these matters, and why
would one want to be the one deciding them?
Subject: Terry Schavo
I found your comments on this issue...well,
interesting.
First off, both my wife and I have (we hope, depending
on the competence of our lawyer) unambiguous, signed and witnessed legal
documents, provided to our family physician, that if we are ever in anything
close to Terry Schiavo's state, any and all measures, including nutrition
and hydration, are to be withdrawn precisely because, to modify a quote from
you a little: "She's [we are] no use to herself [ourselves] or the world, so
turn her [us] off for her (and our) [any everyone else's] good."
We are both organ donors and, we hope and have given
instructions (again, depending on the competence of our lawyer). that if we
come to such a state, anything that is useful to a fellow human in our
bodies will be speedily removed and used as a gesture of mercy to our
bothers and sisters.
We are both Christians (Methodists); she has always
been such; I, once a member of a Roman Catholic religious order, left the
church because I thought that, with the papacy of John Paul II, we had
finally crossed the border from dogmatism to insanity, but that's another
topic for another time.
Because we had the good fortune to be reasonably well
educated and to be able to pay for a lawyer to draft the relevant documents,
and are generally pathologically over-organized in all our affairs, we have
some reasonable hope that our wishes will be carried out (we have also
provided copies of the relevant documents to our executor and family
members, and taken pains to ensure that there is no misunderstanding..
I would suggest that most people, including Terry
Schiavo and her family, are not so fortunate or so organized. I would
further suggest that, given the contrast with the clarity with which we have
tried (perhaps with eventual success, depending on the competence of our
lawyer), to make our wishes known, the courts are the only forum, within our
system of laws, that have the power (if not the competence) to decide the
matter. I would rather have it there than in the hands of a governor with
political ambitions and a legislature whose members may have political
ambitions. If that makes me an elitist, so be it; but I would remind you of
the concern that the founding fathers had with "faction" and the negative
influence it might have on rational public policy.
All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that
you are mixing moral and legal issues, to the detriment of both.
Regards,
Charles MacKay
Gosh. Well, you have more faith in lawyers
than I do. As to the ultimate power of judges, I do not think you will find
that in The Federalist.
Uh -- please tell me how to separate law
from morality without destroying the basis for attracting voluntary
obedience to law? Law with no moral basis is command. Your distrust of
politicians is hardly unique, and one reason why it is astonishing to me
that "democracy" is now to be exported on the points of our bayonets after
the Framers rejected it here, but that too is a matter for another time.
Hard cases make bad law. We have a hard
case here.
And a view from an
emergency room physician (in Florida):
Good morning, Jerry; hope this finds you well.
On the Schiavo matter: you wrote...
"... Point One: the only evidence we have of the
victim's wishes come from the husband, an interested party; and the parents,
not entirely rational; and her religion, which is ambiguous since the
doctrine of the Church on heroic measures is not entirely clear to me: it
forbids suicide but not risky actions, and the usual summary for others is
"thou canst not kill but needst not strive, officiously to keep alive."
One of the reasons I haven't spent a lot of time
weighing in on this matter is that it's very VERY difficult to actually sort
out fact from propagandizing, from either side. However, I spent enough time
under Jesuit and Dominican tutelage that I am at least comfortable with my
comprehension of the Church's basic positions in these matters.
First: suicide, if undertaken by someone in full
possession of their wits, is held to be sinful because, in essence, it is
despair in action; killing oneself because there's no hope of anything
better. Risking one's life in a good cause is held to be the antithesis of
that: one acts in hope that the risk is avoided, the good achieved, and one
survives. If not? One acted in hope of the good, trying to achieve the good,
rather than succumbing to despair and rejecting any possibility that God
might have better in store.
(There's a very interesting discussion, which has been
going on for decades with no resolution whatsoever, about whether a Catholic
spy who uses a "last resort" to avoid giving secrets to an enemy is a
suicide or no, given that whole matter of intent. Me, I decided to avoid
intelligence work in the field... ahem.)
In contrast, Church discussions on heroic measures
don't, as a rule, tend to revolve around despair. The reason that Church
teaching is often "murky-in-the-application" is because heroic, or
extraordinary, measures, are thought about with the same terminology with
which "heroic virtue" is discussed. That is, "heroic" or "extraordinary" is
defined as acts which are laudable, praiseworthy, exemplary... but which
require one to perform or endure things that one is not expected to do in
the course of a normal life. In the medical sphere, that is perforce defined
by technology *and* economics: a detail which most theologians acknowledge,
but are ill-equipped to discuss.
For example: Intubation and ventilator support is a
routine emergency department intervention. It does not constitute
"extraordinary" measures. However, if a patient had a rare form of cancer,
which MIGHT be treatable by an experimental surgical regimen which is quite
rigorous, potentially hazardous, ONLY available in one city, across the
continent, at monstrous expense which there is no reasonable likelihood of
meeting without bankrupting the family... that would constitute an
"extraordinary" measure, and neither the patient nor the family is obligated
to seek out that treatment.
The ends of the spectrum are easy enough: but "the
devil is in the details", however, and one can easily see that the middle of
the spectrum becomes murky. In Schiavo's case, she is apparently capable of
breathing on her own, but cannot take food nor water without ongoing
technological interventions, some of which will intermittently require
surgical or para-surgical procedures to continue being useful. Further,
those interventions do absolutely nothing to procure a cure; they only "buy
time", maintaining the body against the possibility that there MIGHT be some
degree of recovery. That possibility is so remote that there's no likelihood
of change, short of direct Divine intervention. And these procedures are
cumulatively quite costly, not to mention the cost of nursing home care for
someone in a persistent vegetative state; the cost would bankrupt all but
the wealthiest families.
On the grasping hand, Ms. Schiavo is not in a third
world country; there are governmental means to sustain the economic burden.
Such surgical procedures and tubes maintenance as are necessary are not
technically THAT difficult to perform.
For any Church medical morals specialist, this is
*right in the middle* of the ordinary <<-->> heroic/extraordinary spectrum.
It's not a wonder to me that such Churchmen as have spoken out have tended
to focus on issues such as Ms. Schiavo's wishes, and the purportedly sleazy
nature of Mr. Schiavo; one doesn't have to weigh pros and cons to
pontificate.
Does this help any, at least in understanding *what*
the Church teaches in this area? (I'm doing exposition here, not
apologetics...) If not, let me know, and i'll take another swing at it...
Hopefully helpfully, Bill Ernoehazy, MD // dedoc@mac.com
_______________
Do not anger a bard; for your name is silly, and it
scans to "Greensleeves".
Legally perhaps we must concentrate on her
wishes in the matter, since that in itself would seem to settle the matter:
we have no corroboration and the parents and husband contradict. Morally, as
you say, this is right in the middle: a hard case indeed, and one for those
with more authority than I posess.
===
Subject: Norman Dean
FYI Norman Dean's device worked. I used the
information on Dean's device that I got off the internet . Dean's device (US
patent 2886976) was combined with the knowledge from patent's in class
74/84s such as Laskowit's '' centrifugal variable thrust mechanism ''
(1953964) . Dean's device would have produced a trust of 100% at top center
and a trust of 90% to 70% at bottom center. The problems Dean had came
because he choose to show that the device could produce lift instead of
trust. According to the information from your web site it produced a lift of
.1g . The trust would have been 1.6 times the mass of it. Also if the device
had been run at 2000 rpm it would have levitated it self. The people who
attacked Dean made assumptions on how the device and did not know that it
had 100% trust at the top and less at the bottom. The real question is if a
device such as this is going to be energy efficient enough to replace
rockets. Some other people of interest are : Cook (4238968) : Culf
(3968700). The people mentioned above have multiple patent issued to them.
Dan Owens
I am not sure what use was made of the
information got off the Internet? And all one needs to do to get filthy rich
is to produce an actual reactionless drive. I'd love to see that done. Alas,
if anyone has made it work, that secret has been well kept. And, I don't
think there is any evidence other than Harry Stine's memories that Dean's
device produced thrust. Stine thought it had, but what he remembers was not
the device in the patent.
Build one. The world will flock to your
door.
f
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