Maybe somebody — like Father Poumade, who knows about this stuff — can explain how it’s ethical for Georgetown University to use aborted babies for medical experiments? I realize the babies were not aborted for medical explotation, but still…isn’t there something a little creepy about it? Would you want to use the contents of Saddam’s mass graves for experimentation?
Author: Eric Johnson
I’m a “deserter,” Part II
A follow up to my post about President Bush being a “deserter”:
I need to wear my dress uniform for a function on Saturday night, so I was getting my ribbons organized so I could attach them properly. In the Marine Online system, it says I don’t rate the National Defense Medal. The only qualification for the NDM is being on active duty during wartime. As I was on active duty during the Gulf War and the Iraq War, I rate two of them.
Funny though — Marine Online says have a Combat Action Ribbon. In other words, the computer thinks I was in combat during wartime, but during combat I was not on active duty, and thus I do not rate the NDM. Hmm….
I’m a “deserter,” too
According to the official records of the Department of the Navy, I’m a deserter. Or possibly a drug addict. I learned this several years ago when I applied to get my final two months of my G.I. Bill benefits, and received a letter saying that I could not have them because I was discharged by the Marines under “other than honorable” conditions.
That came as quite a shock, because not only was I not discharged that way, I’ve never been discharged at all — I’ve been in the Marine Reserve continuously for 13 years (as of today, come to think of it!) But somewhere in the administrative bowels of the military, there is a record in a database saying that I was “administratively separated” from the Marines in 1997. That’s the kind of discharge they give you when you commit an infraction and they don’t want to bother with the expense of a trial. It’s most often used if you don’t show up for training, or if you test positive for illegal drugs. I’ve tried several times to correct this, because it bothers me that some computer is questioning my character.
I have also had an unusual training history, according to the Marine Corps’ online information system. It says that I went to boot camp in 1994, but that I attended basic infantry school and radio school in 1991. It’s unusual to be in the Marine Corps for three years before learning to be a Marine, but according to this Web site, that’s what happened to me.
So when I hear corpulent gasbag Michael Moore talk about President Bush being a “deserter” because there is no record of him showing up for training in 1972-73, I take it with a grain of salt. Moore’s assumption is that military records are never wrong, which is laughable to anyone who has actually been in the military.
Funny how Moore’s crowd thinks of military men as murderous buffoons when it comes to warfare, but they think the same people keep meticulous, impeccable records of routine matters. They’ve got it exactly backwards: our Department of Defense is superb at fighting. It’s the administrative part that never works quite like it ought.
Gay marriage and the decline of marriage in general
An interesting article by Stanley Kurtz about Nordic countries’ experiment with gay marriage. He claims that gay marriage, far from strengthening traditional marriage, has contributed to the latter’s decline.
I don’t think Kurtz proves his case. He does prove that gay marriage has done nothing to stop the collapse of the family in Nordic countries. However, I don’t think you can make the leap to say that it has hastened it, either. More interesting are some other points, particularly that mothers working outside the home, bastardy, and weak family bonds are caused or at least aggravated by a huge welfare state. (In other words, if you’re a Catholic Democrat, you are in favor of creating conditions where sexual sins will flourish.)
Here’s some good news, though, about the Nordic folkways and their growth in Europe:
Yet the pattern is spreading unevenly. And scholars agree that cultural tradition plays a central role in determining whether a given country moves toward the Nordic family system. Religion is a key variable. A 2002 study by the Max Planck Institute, for example, concluded that countries with the lowest rates of family dissolution and out-of-wedlock births are “strongly dominated by the Catholic confession.” The same study found that in countries with high levels of family dissolution, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, had little influence.
My ancillary theory, based on being in Norway for a couple of weeks, is that Scandinavians have a very high incidence of beautiful women in their population, and that it would take severe mortification to avoid temptation. But my view has not gained ground among social scientists.
Are we men or machines?
I’ve been looking for a new job recently. I don’t want to leave my current position unless I find something better, but it’s probably time to leave before I get burned out and unsuitable for human company. Right now, I do Internet development for a company that owns a slew of news properties, including two you’ve almost certainly heard of. Our team runs the Web sites and the content management system that powers them.
There are plenty of jobs out there, despite what Hodean & The Gang says, but I’ve been picky about where I’ve applied. Several weeks ago, a former co-worker recommended that I submit an application to a company for which she was doing contract work. I did that, and they invited me to an interview. By the end, I wanted to switch my line of work to something more spiritually rewarding, like coal mining.
Margaret, the HR lady, met me at their development office. (I have changed the names in this story to protect the innocent and the guilty.) She introduced me to Benjamin, a skinny, pale, intense little person.
The first few questions were sensible: he handed me a short program, and asked me to tell him what various parts of the code did and what the output would look like. I felt like things were going quite well — we were talking about the kind of things that Web developers should know, and I sailed through that part. Then it started.
“What,” Benjamin asked, “is a Cartesian join?”
“I don’t know,” I said after thinking a moment. “I’ve heard the term but I can’t define it for you.” I don’t believe in pretending I know more than I do, and I find that people usually appreciate that kind of honesty.
“Umm…okay….” He looked taken aback. “Well, tell me what this SQL code will do.”
“Oh,” I said, “That will return a resultset with all the rows in both tables.”
“That’s right. That’s a Cartesian join.”
Okay, I thought to myself, This guy definitely majored in computer science.
Then we went through the looking glass. “Do you know what a Fibonacci sequence is?”
Nope. Sure didn’t. He explained it, and asked me to write a program to calculate it. I started fumbling my way through it. To understand my frustration, an analogy:
is to
running a real Web site
as
knowing about Monet’s paintings of the gardens at Giverny
is to
running the garden in your backyard.
I managed to get over the sheer irrelevance of the task and came up with a solution, but at that point I considered thanking them and leaving.