The Catholic Church is trying to fast-track Anglicans back to the fold.  Some Anglicans are trying to keep the flock in the fold.  Is there a cosmic score card?  Does in the end it all boil down to what jersey one is wearing when one dies?
After years of serious investigation I’ve decided that I don’t think so.  I align myself with the existentialists.

The Catholic Church is trying to fast-track Anglicans back to the fold.  Some Anglicans are trying to keep the flock in the fold.  Is there a cosmic score card?  Does in the end it all boil down to what jersey one is wearing when one dies?
After years of serious investigation I’ve decided that I don’t think so.  I align myself with the existentialists.

Seattle, Washington and Oregon are scorching in summer heat but we are cool (for July) here in Indiana.  The  chorus from the pond is silent tonight and a lone frog sings from the woods as I look at the symmetry of the mowing lines in our (acres of) yard. Something is up.

I have a few thoughts on universal health care in the U.S. so I thought I’d write them down.
I think the first question we have to ask is:  Is health care a right?  Access to health care would be a positive right, meaning somebody has an obligation to provide it for me.  I’ve read a lot of arguments for health care being a right and don’t find them convincing.  So my position is this:  Access to health care isn’t a right, but IS right.  It is something we as a nation should provide.
When the person who serves me at a restaurant gets an upper respiratory infection, am I so heartless that I think he should not be able to see a doctor because his employer doesn’t provide health insurance? (Is it better he just coughs all over my food)?  When the driver of the carriage providing tours through Charleston breaks a leg, should he just have to hobble along because the company can’t afford to provide health insurance?  If the person unlucky enough to be in an accident that causes severe burns, and yet has insurance, be required to lose his house because the insurance ran out?
I think very few in the U.S. are so cold-hearted they would answer yes to these questions.  We want to see these people cared for.  So how do we do it?  That’s where it gets complex (and probably really  boring for the next few entries).

I left Charleston at 10:30 p.m.  I drove through the night to Indiana.  I stopped once and shut my eyes for ten minutes at a North Carolina rest stop, and at another rest stop in Tennessee, I did the same for twenty minutes. The twilight of dawn brings heavy weights to my eyes and pushes them to sleep.  Then, with a little rest I force the sleep from my eyes and drive on.  I made my way home and with a shower and shave I started reading about Wittgenstein.  He’s a soldier and philospher who wrote his greatest work in the trenches of World War One. I’m building on his work as a foundation for my final paper for my bioethics degree.  He’s another soldier and another philosopher from another time . . . one who I will never share a trench or anything else with. But I’m tired. I’ll visit Wittgenstein again tomorrow in my book.

Smoking appears to have sparked a fire that caused $70 million in damage to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington, Naval officials said Wednesday. 

The announcement by the Navy came as Adm. Robert F. Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, relieved the carrier’s commanding officer, Capt. David C. Dykhoff, and the executive officer of duty, Capt. David M. Dober.

Willard cited lost confidence in the commanding officer and his
failure to meet mission standards after the investigation found
unauthorized smoking by a crew member appeared to have ignited
flammable liquids and other combustible material that were improperly
stored. The other officer was relieved of duty for substandard
performance.

“The fire and the subsequent magnitude of the fire were the result
of a series of human acts that could have been prevented,” according to
a statement released by the Naval Air Forces in San Diego.

Wow!  Imagine what kind of repercussions would happen if someone asleep at the wheel allowed something like the twin towers in New York to be brought down.  Oh, yeah … nothing.  Well, hey . . . don’t smoke or someone above you will pay unless he is the president.

I started this year with a live mother and mother-in-law and
a child still living at home.  The year
is only 2/3’ds over and I no longer have a living mother, mother-in-law or any
children at home.  The drought in
south-central Indiana has left the grass brown and crisp and the tulip trees,
cottonwoods and river birches have largely given up the ghost and called it
quits for the year.  There seems to be a
lot less life flowing through this place than there was just a year ago,
despite the difficulties that were flowing through the streams then.  Normally I can walk among the plants and see
the beauty and coax them into better effort. 
Now, we’re just all of us, out of energy.

This will pass.  It’s
simply a matter of redefining myself and reorienting to the new horizon.  But for the first time, I’m looking forward
to the winter that will erase the chalkboard of this year.

I’ve blogged about my oldest daughter leaving for school.

Last night (today) my youngest left.

I’ve got no spare child left.

Why does it feel so bad when everything that we’ve wantend them to become actually comes about and they sprout their wings and fly without us?

Yes, I’m happy she made the drive from Indiana to South Carolina.  Yes, I’m sad she did it without me.  How could she do this without me?  What am I to do now that she is steering without me?

When Are We Dead?

This used to be a fairly easy question, although sometimes we got it wrong based on scratches on coffin lids.

It’s harder these days when one considers ventilators, artificial hearts, pacemakers, etc.  It’s actually a much debated question in medicine and philosophy (areas that I love).

I live considerably in both my brain and body.  I completed my MD degree and am working on my MA degree in bioethics.  If my higher brain function stopped and I could no longer participate in those worlds I would consider myself dead and be unwilling to continue and pissed off if I were forced to.  I live extensively in my body too.  I’m reminded of a couple of lines from a movie where one said that he treats his body like a temple and the other say’s “and I treat mine like an amusement park.”  Yep, even though I can still get into clothes I wore in high school, I treat my body like an amusement park.

I believe I’ve blogged on this point before: I have instructed my wife that the first time I shit in my pants I want her to get a gun and shoot me, and that she loves me so much and is so intent on fulfilling my wishes that every time I break wind she grabs a gun and checks my drawers.

If I could not think or recognize those around me, or if my body disintegrated into something which only kept my brain alive I would consider myself to be dead.

When would you be dead?

BRATTLEBORO, Vermont (Reuters) – A Vermont town that is gaining national
attention for brash displays of nudity — from teens in the buff to naked
elderly people — awoke on Wednesday to an emergency ban on nakedness in most
public places.

Officials in Brattleboro voted 3 to 2 on Tuesday night for a temporary
30-day ordinance prohibiting people from going about in the nude.

Public nudity made headlines last summer when the weather grew hot and a
couple of dozen teens took to holding hula hoop contests, riding bikes and
parading past stores wearing only their birthday suits. The disrobing has
resumed this summer.  

 http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1823185120070718

I have mixed feelings about this. 
First of all, I can’t imagine living in a town that believes in personal
freedom so much that the city council would be so evenly divided as to whether
strolling around in the buff should be limited. 
I wish I lived in such a progressive town.  In this part of Indiana I’m pretty sure that
breast feeding in public is against the law. 
After Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl one
mother wrote a letter to the editor asking how she would ever be able to undo
the damage done to her children by seeing that breast.  (Yes, it’s true, though I suspect that most
any damage done to her children has actually been done by her).

Before I had my own pool in the middle of 58 acres I would have loved for
there to be a local pool where I could have gone skinny dipping, which is still
legal in Brattleboro.

Still, I can understand why perhaps some might not want people strolling
nude in the middle of downtown.  It
wouldn’t bother me any more than someone strolling in a really bad paisley jumpsuit
or a man in bad golf attire.  But I’m
probably weird in that way.  I really
wouldn’t care, but I can see how some might.

What I think is really cool though, is that it was teenagers that initiated
this.  These are rebellious teenagers in
the fashion that teenagers were rebellious in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  For the most part, it seems to me that the
youth of today have lost that real rebellious spirit.  It’s much safer to go along, don’t challenge
authority, don’t challenge the mainstream middle of the road, stay safe, stay
comfortable, don’t risk losing your cell phone or PS3.

Hermann Hesse wrote: “The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience
to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire”.  I kind of like the heat of the fire and I’m
really happy to see that rebellion is still alive in teenagers.  Maybe they’ll even stand up and challenge our
emperor’s clothing one day.