Month: September 2002

Europeans Cannot Even Enforce Their Own Travel Ban

In response to the increasingly dictatorial nature of the Zimbabwe regime, the European Union early this year enacted a number of sanctions against Zimbabwe, including a ban on travel by members of Zimbabwe’s government.

But, of course, they didn’t mean it. This month Zimbabwe’s Trade Minister was allowed to travel to Brussels, Belgium — which houses the headquarters for the European Union — for a series of talks related to issues in developing nations (previously Zimbabwean officials made trips to France and Italy). An article on the row in the British newspaper The Independent noted that,

Zimbabwe’s élite has already taken advantage of a loophole in the EU’s travel ban to attend UN-sponsored or international meetings in Italy and France. However critics argue that, by travelling to the EU’s headquarters in Brussels, the minister is exposing the sanctions to particular ridicule.

Something making a mockery of the EU? Imagine that!

Source:

Anger over visa for Zimbabwe minister. Stephen Castle, The Independent, September 26, 2002.

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on Affirmative Action

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is running for governor of Maryland. At a recent debate with her opponent, Robert Ehrlich, Townsend pointedly accused Ehrlich of opposing race-based affirmative action. Here’s her stunning defense of such initiatives,

He opposes affirmative action based on race. Well, let me tell you, slavery was based on race. Lynching was based on race. Discrimination is based on race. Jim Crow was based on race., and affirmative action should be based on race.

And she thinks that’s a defense of affirmative action. Oy.

Source:

Gloves come off at political debate. Associated Press, September 27, 2002.

Washington, DC Keystone Kops

The Associated Press reports that police in Washington, DC are once again looking at Ingmar Guandique as a possible suspect in the murder of Chandra Levy. Guandique was arrested and convicted for attacking two female joggers in the same general area that Levy’s remains were found.

The scary thing is that DC police had ruled him out as a suspect apparently based largely on the fact that he passed a lie detector test. Now the police want him to take another lie detector test because they think the first one was faulty.

What is really faulty here is that a pseudoscientific process like a lie detector test is used to rule suspects in or out. Why don’t they just bring Uri Geller and a bunch of kids with dowsing rods in to tell them whether or not Guandique killed Levy. They’re likely to be as accurate as their lie detector test.

Source:

D.C. Police Probing Man in Levy Murder. Associated Press, September 29, 2002.

Colin Aric Brian Carnell

On Saturday, Sept. 21, 2002 at 8:50 a.m., my wife, Lisa, gave birth to our second child, Colin Aric Brian Carnell. But to really explain the experience, first you have to know about Christmas 1996.

That was when my daughter decided to be born, and I can without any qualms say it was one of the most hellish experiences I’ve ever been through, and in some ways the second time around was even worse.

Back in 1996, my wife first noticed she seemed to be having more regular contractions very early in the morning. But since they were still very far apart, we drove the 60 minutes or so to a relative’s house for Christmas festivities anyway. We drove back in a nice snowstorm and went directly to the hospital.

Lisa is one of those people who wants as natural a childbirth as possible so she had almost no pain killing drugs (and an epidural was strictly out of the question). I had an abscessed wisdom tooth that was pulled a few days later and was myself in excruciating pain at the time (though I would not have switched places with her for anything). And on top of it all, it took almost 24 hours for my daughter to make her way out.

After that my opinion is that women who do not want epidurals or pain killers must secretly be masochists. Would I want an epidural if I were pregnant woman? Hell no, I’d want at least three of them and all the pain medication doctors are legally allowed to give.

But we should have expected that from the pregnancy which was one long vomit-fest. Lisa literally vomitted 6-12 times a day for almost 6 months. Ah, the miracle of pregnancy and childbirth. The real downside was that Emma came out being just on the edge of being low birth weight. Today she’s almost 6, but people who don’t know her guess she’s 4.

Compared to that, the second pregnancy was a breeze. There was no marathon vomitting and the ultrasounds revealed the child would be at least 7 pounds.

So we go to bed Friday night with Lisa thinking she’s having contractions and she wakes me up at 2:30 a.m. to confirm that indeed the baby is on its way. We both try to sleep for another hour, then wake up our daughter, call the relatives, and head out to the hospital. By this time it is 4:30 a.m. and my neighborhood is still filled with drunken students staggering around. My daughter asks me if all of the people on the street are coming to see Colin be born? I tell her that they might end up at the hospital for different reasons, but definitely not to see her soon-to-be baby brother.

We arrive at the hospital and my in-laws arrive around 6 a.m. or so. And then it starts to look like Christmas 1996 all over again. Lisa’s contractions are becoming longer, more frequent, and obviously much more painful, but she’s not dilating much.

Then Emma starts getting antsy because she didn’t get any sleep and she’s stuck in a boring hospital. So my in-laws take her to a waiting area on a lower floor (there are no waiting areas on the birthing floor) to play for awhile and watch television.

And then everything pretty much happens at high speed. One minute she’s not dilating, the next minute Lisa is screaming her head off, the midwife says she’s fully dilated, and the next thing I know there are 7 or 8 doctors, nurses and other hospital staff in the room. Something about how they’re not getting good readings from the electrodes attached to the baby’s skull.

Then, I can clearly see the head and within a few minutes the baby is out. And then the midwife is doing the most controlled yelling of instructions I’ve ever seen. I look down and see why — there’s a goddamn umbilical cord wrapped once around the baby’s shoulder and then around his neck looking for all the world like some H.R. Giger painting of some alien parasite trying to suck the life out of the baby. The midwife just has this complete look of clarity and serenity, and while she’s yelling to the other doctors and staff that the cord is around the neck, she simultaneously removes the cord in a ballet-esque move that defies all logic. I saw her do it, but I still don’t know exactly how.

I don’t know if my wife saw or heard any of that, but I’m freaking out inside while trying to maintain some outward sense of composure. Once they’ve got the baby on a warming table to boost his temperature, I’m asking how much I need to worry about this. She’s reassuring me that the fetal monitor only indicated any sort of distress for a very brief time, so I shouldn’t worry. Right, tell that to the millions of years of evolutionary instinct that’s still screaming “danger, danger” as if I’d been temporarily awarded an after-the-fact Spidey sense.

Otherwise, the baby and mother are doing fine and the big sister is extremely impressed by it all. More pictures to follow soon.

USA Today on Atlas Shrugged

USA Today has an enormous front page story today on, of all things, Ayn Rand’s horrible novel Atlas Shrugged. The article is centered on CEOs reading the book as a defense of what they do in light of corporate scandals.

I’m amazed that busy CEOs would have the time or energy to plow through it. Even though I agree with Rand on many things, Atlas Shrugged is ideological fiction at its worst, including an enormous political speech that goes on for something like 50-70 pages.

But to be fair to Rand, some of the criticism in the USA Today article seems unfair. For example, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, CEO of the Leadership Institute at Yale University, claims that,

Ayn Rand did not anticipate CEOs who would loot their firms for hundreds of millions of dollars beofre bankrupting them.

But if you actually read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead (which is not a very good novel either, but a better polemic than Atlas Shrugged) I think it is clear that Rand did anticipate crooked/corrupt businessmen and lays out quite well her view of such people. Rand certainly was clear in her vehement opposition to fraud, whether originating in the private or public sectors (though she did think, like many of the people interviewed in the USA Today article, that many CEOs and businesses had received a bum rap).

Good for Buzz Aldrin

Over the past couple weeks, a number of people had weighed in as supporting Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon and, who decked an idiot who asked Aldrin to swear on a Bible that the Moon landing actually took place. The idiot, Bart Sibrel, is one of those folks who think the entire moon landing was staged.

But as much as I’m a fan of Aldrin, it didn’t seem to me that being asked to swear on a Bible that you weren’t a liar was rude, I’m not sure it warranted punching Sibrel out.

But the BBC has the rest of the story in an article about Aldrin being cleared of any charges in the matter. Sibrel lured Aldrin to a hotel on the false claim that he wanted to interview the astronaut. Sibrel then called Aldrin a “thief, liar and coward,” and physically poked Aldrin with the Bible.

And, as he had every right to, Aldrin then decked Sibrel. If I were a celebrity who thought he was doing a straighforward interview, only to end up outside a hotel with some wacko poking me with a Bible and demanding I swear on it that I wasn’t a fraud, I think I’d follow the same course of action.