He wasn't the stingray hunter

Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, is no more. While I feel sympathy for his family, there's some poetic justice in a man who regularly taught his audience that dangerous animals were things to be played with, wrestled and filmed for no real purpose--he had a private for-profit animal park, not a research facility, not a program to save endangered animals--losing his life to an animal's natural defenses. Of course, there would have been more justice in his losing it to a crocodile than to a relatively harmless stingray, but I suppose we all have our achilles' heels. But who will hold his children just out of reach of crocodile's jaws now? Crikey!

Porque?

I don't understand CourtTV. I never have and I probably never will. Law and Order: Intensive Parking Unit has convinced people that the legal system is interesting in ways that it simply isn't. But whatever deep and important creepiness there is to John Mark Karr, why, oh why is Nancy Grace still covering him? Yes, he's a pedophile (though we don't yet know that he is more than a theoretical one), but he didn't kill JonBenet--pretty much anyone (who is not currently a District Attorney in Boulder) could have figured that out without flying him to the US--we aren't sure how much else he did other than possessing and trading in child porn (and, yes, that is truly horrible) and failing to show up for court appearances. It just isn't that interesting. I almost want to commit a crime just so Nancy Grace can get exercised about something interesting.

He's growing and the ladies love him

By local, you mean the Republican party?

In his "Wow, look at how great we've done with restoring the Gulf Coast and New Orleans" speech this week, el presidente took special note of the resurrection of the schools in New Orleans. He pointed out the presence of charter schools in NO--without mentioning recent studies that appear to show that charter schools do no better but perhaps worse than old-fashioned public schools while removing education from at least some of the traditional oversight.
This was part of his point about the schools in NO, namely that we need more local control in education. In some respects I am sympathetic with the idea behind local control of resources, though I am suspicious of local control of some aspects of education--it's just such local control that causes Kansas' science curriculum to change every election cycle, as the state school board goes from fundamentalist to rationalist and back again.
But, for Bush to call for more local control of schools is laughable. This isn't the Reagan presidency, with its promise of doing away with or at least eviscerating the Department of Education. This is the President of No Child Left Behind, one of the biggest unfunded mandates of recent memory, a program that tells the states that they have to institute more testing, more remedial programs and that they have to pay for it themselves.
Local control? Actually, a lot more centralization. Mentioning local control might please those in his base in favor of parochial and other private schools but, apart from voucher programs there has been a lot more centralization of education policy in Washington.
And, now, his Department of Education wants to do for higher education what it did for elementary and secondary schools, mandatory standardized testing (pretty much unworkable in any case, unless it tests only the most basic, i.e., high-school level, parts of the education)--to replace the local control we now have through faculty, boards of directors and regents, legislatures (in some cases) and the ability of students to vote with their dollars.
It used to be that the GOP was the party of less government. It was pretty much the only thing that was appealing about it. Bush has shown his ability to resuscitate that libertarian rhetoric, but there's nothing local in the kind of control his policies have instituted.

Maybe if they were all wealthy, white beauty queens

How many children died in Darfur this week? (How many around the world? How many were raped? How many forced into prostitution or war? How many infected with HIV?) And, given that, why is JonBenet Ramsey once again so important that CNN, FOX News(?) and all the major networks go into orgasmic spasms about an insane man who claims to have killed her (but about whom we apparently know little more than he is a pedophile who may not even have been in Boulder at the relevant time)?

Mateo Patagon!

On Monday, we drove to Ramona and picked out and picked up our new puppy. He's a 7.5 week old Vizsla, named Mateo. It turns out that he's a really good howler and is also getting a pretty good handle on barking--I've been sleeping in the room with his crate, well, not sleeping, actually--but he's also pretty smart. And, he's too damned cute.

The lab or the dumpster

So, the President has finally exercised his veto power, five-and-a-half years into his presidency. There is at least one thing that he exceeds at, then, approving bills (with signing statements that void a lot of their content) presented to him by the legislative branch.
It was stem-cell research that finally got him not to sign a bill. Again, I am somewhat sympathetic to Bush's position on stem-cell research. While I am not certain, by any means, that a fertilized egg is a human being and I know that there are all sorts of problems with notions of potentiality, I also know that in a fertilized egg we have the material (in some sense) to make a human being, at the very least the genetic code that will be instantiated in the completed person. Bush thinks that killing fertilized eggs (byproducts of the process of in vitro fertilization in which more eggs are fertilized than can be used) in order to do research on the stem cells crosses a moral line from which there is no return.
One important issue here, though, is what the alternative is. Although there are some instances, witnessed by the children from adopted extra fertilized eggs present at today's veto, in which these fertilized eggs are implanted and become children, the vast majority of such eggs will ultimately be discarded.
So, it is largely not a choice between using these eggs for research and treating them with dignity. It is a choice between using them for research and discarding them. If there is a moral line being crossed, the line is crossed when we fertilize eggs in the labs of fertility clinics and then do not implant them. Once we have them sitting around in freezers, we are no longer in the moral position to talk about what treats them with dignity; unless we are willing to demand that all of them get a chance at life. Instead, we really are in the realm of deciding how we can treat them in ways that best serve the rest of the population; the issue of their dignity has passed. Perhaps the answer is to rethink our policies with regard to fertility. Why is it that we think that everyone has a right to a child of their own, or that infertility is a problem to be solved? And, if we agree that this is a right or a problem that our doctors should solve, then why aren't we troubled by the creation of extra fertilized ova?