Federal Reserve begins QE3

This can't end well...

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In-vitro adoptions rising among evangelical Christians

Krista Kapralos writes a most fascinating piece in The Washington Post this week: about how evangelical Christians are coming to the forefront of adopting frozen embryos that have been fertilized in-vitro. The article cites that there could be approximately 600,000 embryos being stored in liquid nitrogen around the United States. And that in keeping with their pro-life values, many who identify themselves as conservative Christians are choosing to legally adopt children... and then carrying them to term on their own.

From the article...

The embryo was frozen in liquid nitrogen when Gabriel and Callie Fluhrer found it. They didn’t know whether that embryo would grow to be a boy or a girl, or whether it would even grow at all.

But to the Fluhrers, it was worth the risk. That tiny collection of cells was a baby, they believed. And if they didn’t pluck it from the warehouse where it had been stored since its biological parents decided they didn’t need or want it any longer, it was likely to die.

“If we’re going to stand against abortion, it’s not simply picketing a clinic,” said Gabriel Fluhrer, a public relations and publishing coordinator for the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. “It’s doing the hard work of adopting the orphans around the world, whether embryos or orphans living in China.”

Anna Fluhrer was born in December 2010: from a frozen embryo to a healthy baby girl.

For some reason or another, I found myself studying human embryology last week, particularly the first few days and weeks of the zygote. Something that keeps fascinating me: how the heck does a little ball of cells like that know how and where to achieve bilateral symmetry? That seems like such a tiny detail but for the life of me, I can't figure it out.

Pondering about that reinforced something that I was told years ago by someone in the medical profession: that a baby truly is a miracle. There are a thousand things that could go wrong in a pregnancy, but more often than not a healthy human being is born. We don't appreciate that nearly enough.

So back to this story: as a person who strongly believes that human life begins at conception, I have to applaud that there are many people who are willing to demonstrate their ethics in this fashion. I'm also of the mind that medical knowledge is a wonderful gift from God and that it absolutely can be a blessing for those who need it, including for those who on their own cannot conceive a child.

But I'm also now seeing how my friends among the Catholic persuasion are onto something as well with their church's position that in-vitro fertilization is wrong. Because of all those hundreds of thousands of lab-fertilized embryos, many of them won't be implanted at all. Quite a number of them are fertilized but otherwise not viable for coming to full term. And therein is the ethical problem: that the in-vitro procedure, in an effort to bring about new human life, must also acknowledge that human lives will be lost as an unavoidable consequence.

I'm not coming down one way or another about this. Just wondering aloud if, perhaps, in some ways the miracle of medical technology exceeds our moral grasp.

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Two sequels to INDEPENDENCE DAY being produced

"Welcome to Urf"... again.

(Hah-hah-hah, did you see what I did there? Did you?!)

Word breaking this afternoon is that TWO sequels to the 1996 sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day are in the works. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are trying to get everyone from the original back on board. Right now the follow-ups are titled ID Forever Part One and ID Forever Part Two. How clever...

I have extremely mixed feelings about this. Yeah, even considering how much of a fan I was - and always will be - of the original. 1996's Independence Day was a unique product of its era. It should remain as much. At the same time it was such a great concept now tied down to being so dated a film that it's one of the few movies that I could see a reboot/remake being in order. Just as long as those eyeball-goggling practical effects make a return.

Oh yeah, it's also been announced that the sequels will be filmed in 2-D and then converted to 3-D in post-production...

"AWWW HELL NAW!!!"

A tip o' the hat to this blog's good friend Drew McOmber for passing along news of this... thing.

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Why the hell do we even have embassies in Egypt and Libya?

Civility is a chosen virtue. It cannot be imposed or expected from those who refuse to accept it and its responsibilities.

Time to get out of the Mid-East until "countries" like Egypt and Libya learn to behave. Pull EVERYTHING out, including all those billions of dollars of aid they get from us one way or another.

If they want to return to barbarism that bad enough, who are we to stop them?

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Fire the striking Chicago teachers... and ban them from the classroom for life

More than 400,000 schoolchildren in Chicago are without educators today after the teachers union there went on strike. I say "educators" lightly because by some accounts nearly 80% of eighth graders in Chicago public schools don't have adequate reading skills.

So these "teachers", who are already paid on average between $71,000 and $76,000 before benefits, and are only working nine months out of the year anyway, are going on strike because a 16% pay raise apparently isn't enough. These people's starting salary is $50,000.

Chicago is paying an insane amount of money out of the public treasury and getting some piss-poor results from it. So who the hell are these "educators" to demand more pay?

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel should take some real leadership initiative and order every teacher back into the classroom within 48 hours, under penalty of being banned for life from teaching in the city's public schools. Just as President Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers who went on strike in 1981. I don't doubt that there are many sincere and dedicated teachers out there looking for work and who would be exceedingly satisfied to take those positions... and for a far more sane rate of pay, at that.

Would Mayor Emanuel have the courage to defy the teachers union like that?

Never mind answering that question. I was being facetious.

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Hound of the Baskervilles?

It is seriously foggy this morning. Like, the kind of fog that Arthur Conan Doyle used to vividly describe as covering the moors of Britain in his Sherlock Holmes stories.

So after letting Tammy out to do her "doggie business", the notion struck that there might be a photo opportunity.

And here she is, bounding out of the mists like a ferocious creature in murderous pursuit of prey...

Okay, granted: a four-month old miniature dachshund puppy is not that ferocious. But please don't tell her that :-)

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"Asylum of the Daleks": Season premiere of DOCTOR WHO is certifiably insanely good!

Is it just me, or has Doctor Who suddenly become a bigger presence in American pop culture than ever before? Every Barnes & Noble I've been into lately has an entire table devoted to Doctor Who books and other merchandise. Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly earlier this summer. A friend in Roanoke spotted a comic book store this past week: the marquee outside said "TALKING ABOUT REGENERATION" to advertise Doctor Who stuff inside.

I've been watching Doctor Who since the winter of 1981. But in more than thirty years I've never seen the Doctor and his mythology as wildly popular on this side of the pond as it is now.

It's been almost a year since last season's finale "The Wedding of River Song" and more than eight months since "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe". However you figure it, this is the longest respite we've had since the BBC brought Doctor Who back in 2005. But showrunner Steven Moffat sure knows how to make the wait worth it...

I wasn't able to see "Asylum of the Daleks" until the morning after it premiered this past Saturday night. And I didn't get to write about it sooner but I have watched it twice more... and I'm still not getting enough of it! This is by far the strongest premiere of Doctor Who that we've seen yet and if this is any indication of what Moffat and his crew have in store for us the rest of this season, we are in for a hella dark and scary ride. Maybe even darker than last year's series...

"Asylum of the Daleks" opens with a sweeping and frightening vista of a place we haven't seen in a very long time: Skaro, the original home world of the Daleks. In quick fashion we witness the Doctor (Matt Smith) - still believed dead by the universe at large - along with Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill) abducted by human agents of the Daleks and brought to what might be the most horrifying place we've seen yet in Doctor Who history: the Parliament of the Daleks. Yes folks, seems that even the Daleks have politicians. And right when you'd think that they are ready to at last exterminate their oldest and greatest nemesis, they screech out a frantic plea: "Save us."

It's a prelude to what is doubtless an even more horrifying location: the Asylum. A cordoned-off planet containing millions of insane Daleks: the absolute worst and most uncontrollable of the most evil alien race in all the universe. And now it looks like the inmates are going to break loose.

It's a terrific story, and in finest Moffat-scribed fashion one replete with twists and surprises. It is also a hoot to see every Dalek variant since the show's beginning represented in the Asylum, including the Special Weapons Dalek first (and last) seen in the 1988 story Remembrance of the Daleks. My one beef with the episode is that I was extremely looking forward to seeing all of those insane Daleks going full-tilt whacko, when for the most part we see them inert and passive. Well, except for the ones in the intensive care ward... but you'll just have to watch to see what makes them such a special case. All in all though, this was a rollickin' wild and fun opening for the season. Showing the Daleks madder than usual was quite an innovative way to re-emphasize their evil nature. And by the end of the episode we get fairly good confirmation of what will be this season's motif: the question that was mentioned in "The Wedding of River Song". The first question. The oldest question in the universe. Hidden in plain sight. The question that the Doctor has been running from all his life...

"Doctor who?"

Like I said, if "Asylum of the Daleks" is any indication, this season is going to be in-tense.

I'm going to give "Asylum of the Daleks" Four and 1/2 Sonic Screwdrivers out of a possible five. And next time on Doctor Who: "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"!

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