Posted 6/07/2004 02:05:00 PM by Andy

"The end-to-end principle is one of a very few ideas in human history that are permanently radical--ideas that always provide leverage in the fight of the interesting versus the dull. Competitive markets are permanently radical, literacy is permanently radical, the First Amendment is permanently radical, and now we can add end-to-end to that list."
--Clay Shirky

The teachings of Jesus are permanently radical, too.
(--Richard Rohr)

Posted 5/24/2004 02:54:00 PM by Andy

The thunderstorms here de-powered our ISP, so I've been 'Net-less for three days. Now I'm digging out from under the pile. Blogging will resume (to its usual level of intermittance) shortly.

Posted 5/21/2004 11:07:00 AM by Andy

(link).

Write your Congresscritters.

Posted 5/18/2004 05:37:00 PM by Andy

"For the record, I do have a sense of humor, and one thing that amuses me is to answer misguided emotional outbursts with arid rationalism. The opportunity to compose this aridly rationalistic comment contributed significantly to my enjoyment of this afternoon. Thank you. :-)."
--Me

Posted 5/18/2004 01:50:00 PM by Andy

Look.

Posted 5/17/2004 05:23:00 PM by Andy

"Two former weapons inspectors--Hans Blix and David Kay--said the shell was likely a stray weapon that had been scavenged by militants and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles of such weapons."

Where did they scavenge it from?

Posted 5/16/2004 10:10:00 PM by Andy

This is far too sensible. Call the secret police.

Posted 5/16/2004 05:25:00 PM by Andy

"So turning her back on traditional medicine, Milton-Jones was relying on the Austrian physician, Dr. Mohammad Khalifa, and his "knee tissue manipulation," which is believed to stimulate re-growth of the tissue in a non-invasive procedure. Khalifa told Milton-Jones his hands are so sensitive that he can feel the nerve endings in the body, and by rubbing his thumbs in a circular motion on the front of Milton-Jones' knee, Khalifa believes he stimulates those nerve endings to help encourage the body's natural healing process.

"Milton-Jones, who has started for the Los Angeles Sparks for the past five seasons, wanted desperately to believe. The WNBA season was just around the corner, and the Olympics were a mere six months away. Surgery would surely put both in jeopardy, so Khalifa and the two 90-minute sessions a week he required were certainly worth taking a chance on.

"If only those thumbs would stop digging. And then, they did.

""Stand up," Khalifa said.

"Milton-Jones grabbed for her crutches, but Khalifa shook his head. Then he asked the unthinkable: "Jog in place."

"So Milton-Jones took a tentative step. Quickly, she realized the knee felt stable, almost normal. And pretty soon, Khalifa had her jumping off the injured knee as if going for a layup, then doing defensive slides -- completely pain-free.

""How does it feel?" he asked. The knee felt good, but Khalifa wasn't satisfied.

""We do not want 'good,' " he said. "We want perfect."

"Khalifa then went to work rubbing the back of Milton-Jones' knee. And when he was done and had her go through the same drills, the knee, in fact, felt perfect. She had good range of motion, and the swelling was minimal.

""It was a miracle," Milton-Jones said recently when recounting the experience during a phone interview.

"How else can you describe her recovery? Although two MRIs -- one by USA Basketball shortly after the initial injury and a second test five weeks later by the L.A. Sparks -- indicated a complete tear of the ACL in her right knee, Milton-Jones' latest MRI shows scar tissue but no tear."

Emphasis in the original.

Something happened here, and we have no idea what. (We'd have a slightly better idea if the writer, Nancy Lieberman, were a competent journalist rather than a former basketball star--"two 90-minute sessions a week" is not instantaneous healing.) Perhaps--probably--even Dr. Khalifa doesn't correctly understand how or why his treatment really works. Perhaps it doesn't work at all. But we have more than hearsay evidence that an ACL was torn and isn't anymore. If I were a research physician, I would set up an MRI machine in Dr. Khalifa's clinic and take daily MRIs of as many of his patients as possible. This is not a miracle; it's medicine. We can, and must, understand why and how it works.

Posted 5/16/2004 02:37:00 PM by Andy

Josh Chafetz, like my entire family, doesn't understand evangelical Christianity.

> the idea that religion has to be hip to be relevant

It's not about "hip"; it's about "engaged". God, too, lives in the real, present world. That world includes skateboards and body piercings. God is all things to all people (he is large, he contains multitudes). To me he's a philosopher. To a sk8er boi he may be a sk8er boi. Neither diminishes him.

> in the long term, I think most of us want transcendence

God is *both* transcendent and immanent. The God of the suburban megachurch and the old red hymnal isn't transcendent, he's just absent.

>, and bringing religion down to the level of

This may be "down", but it's the down of heaven -> earth, not the down of high -> low. The whole point of Christianity is that God descended, and descends, to our level, because he loves us. He doesn't need or even want us to leave our lives and go to some idealized fairyland in order to worship him. He meets us where we are.

[Now playing: "God Is In" by Billy Jonas.]

Posted 5/15/2004 06:12:00 PM by Andy

ROTFL!