Author: Aaron Weber

This is a title here

You may be a duppie but that doesn’t mean you have to go jump off a bridge.

Particularly fun bit about a man who jumped in protest of the Iraq war:

The Coast Guard crew, wearing their standard jumper-retrieval garb to protect against leaking body fluids—Tyvex biohazard suits, masks, gloves, and safety goggles—began C.P.R. Half an hour later, Alarab was pronounced dead. Gary Tindel, the assistant coroner of Marin County, who examined the body on the dock at Fort Baker, at the north end of the bridge, observed that “massive bleeding had occurred in both ears, along with apparent grayish brain matter in and around the right ear.”

and about a man who used to campaign for an anti-suicide net or fence:

He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’”

Unsurprising News

Bush doesn’t think that the investigation will find the leaker. Perhaps because the investigation will look through information provided by the White House, after it’s been vetted for critical information!

The fox is in the henhouse kids. Prepare for slaughter.

Morning Fix

I wrote a letter to Mark Morford, the SF Gate Morning Fix writer, and he responded, sort of.

Mark, I love your column, I really do. But I want you to remember, occasionally, that patriotism isn’t the same thing as miniature flags on SUV’s. Patriotism can be a beautiful, wonderful thing, and if you reject patriotism because of the scoundrels who take refuge in it, then you lose, in a lot of ways, a cultural battle that is very important to win: the battle against the myth that liberals hate America. What I’m saying is, don’t recall patriotism: recall jingoism. I know that’s what you meant, but please be clearer! Think of all the good things about this country: freedom and organic food and voting and newspapers and having a job so you can feed your family. Believing what you want to believe. Public parks and and free education and teenagers making out in back seats without being beaten to death for violating public morals. The US isn’t perfect, no country is, but please don’t pretend that those who love it are all idiots– you love it too, you need to admit this, and if you’d get outside of it once in awhile and see what the rest of the world is like, you’d realize just how good you’ve got it. A lot of the left has abandoned patriotism and the American flag because they think it all means international empire and so forth. But the US does some good stuff too– international aid, the peace corps, Radio Free Wherever. Don’t give up on your country– you take too much for granted sometimes.

His response, as usual without the initial letter, was published in today’s newsletter. I’m not sure he got my point, but then again, his column is supposed to be totally off-balance, and my request for balance, if heeded, would totally ruin it.

— To verbal: Well this is the entire point, isn’t it? That thoseaccused of hating their country and of being traitors for calling Bush a dangerous small-minded warmongering idiot lo these past months tend to be, in fact, the most patriotic of all, and not just for celebrating their freedom of speech and questioning the direction of the nation, but for defending for what this country actually stands for, which is peace and nonaggression and the idea that we do not attack crappy little defenseless non-threatening countries just to further the desires of the president’s petrochemical cronies. Believe you me, I believe in patriotism. I understand it well. And hardcore lockstep GOP war hawks who want dissent silenced and want to wiretap your email have proven to be the least patriotic of all.

Creepy Moral Thought Experiments

Since it’s Friday and after five PM, here are some creepy thoughts that make for great barroom conversation:

If you have a clone, is it OK to have sex with them? Does that count as masturbation, or incest? Probably incest, since they’d be like an identical twin. But what if you had a body part, like an arm, cloned and grafted to you– would it be OK to use that for sex? How about if it wasn’t attached to you– just a spare organ poking out of a nutrient-delivery system?

Many people refuse to eat meat because the animals cannot consent to it. Even if the animal flesh were grown in some sort of a vat, the animal would not have consented to the use of its genetic material. But if you could give a few stem cells, and grow your own human-steaks in a vat, and then eat your own legs for dinner, that would not involve any violation of rights or taking of lives. Is that the most ethical meat-eating possible, or is it cannibalism?

What is the line between the commonly accepted practice of veterinary artificial insemination and bestiality? If you are a veterinarian specialising in artificial insemination technology, at what point do you enjoy your career a little too much? From the legal point of view my guess is that masturbating horses is not a crime as long as you have the permission of the horse’s owner and you plan to freeze the semen in liquid nitrogen.

IE

OK, so, my stylesheet-foo is not up to par. I managed to get the search bar not to break through the sidebar, but Internet Explorer users are still going to have to scroll horizontally in order to read this. But nobody who reads this uses IE– the top browsesr are Safari, Galeon, and various RSS aggregators. Yes, Soup, from the Evolution summary, is in the top five.