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hurricanemary23
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Name: Mary
Country: United States
Gender: Female
Interests: Reading, sewing, swimming, watching movies with friends
Expertise: Worthless medical trivia. Parainfluenza viruses. Foreign languages. Wedding planning. And most importantly, how to keep thetap happy.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message me
AIM:  hurricanemary23
Member Since:
6/2/2005
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| ...that might curb the media kingmaking tendency and keep the whole country a little bit saner.
Exploratory committees can be formed at any time.
January: Deadline to announce candidacy.
January-June: A six month lag period, in which a couple of things should take place. 1) Fundraising. 2) Investigative journalism. All the Republicans get smeared equally, of course. But if there's a large field of Democrats, the media is unlikely to be able to converge on just one they like (there isn't a charisma machine every cycle!), so each media outlet will choose one to whitewash and several to smear. Either way, every candidate gets some ugly exposed. 3) A series of four debates, two for each party, with the first debate to be moderated by a member of the same party and the second to be moderated by a member of the opposite party.
June: National primary for each party. No more of this three-states-decide-it-all stuff.
August: Conventions.
September-October: Campaigning, and the traditional series of debates. One debate must be moderated by a liberal, one by a conservative, and one by a moderate. The media can then still try to smear the conservative, but they'll already have aired the ugly on the Democrat earlier. And it'll be on YouTube where they can't do anything about it.
November: Election.
If we'd had a system like this in 2008, I don't think either of the final contenders would have made it to the general. Hillary would almost certainly have been the Democratic nominee; if she'd been feeling generous she might have made Obama veep. Who knows who would have run on the Republican side. The Democrats would still have won the presidency. But maybe the people would have had a little more say in the decision.
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| I have to take an ethics class this semester. Apparently this is a new thing required by the NIH for all grad students in the "biomedical" sciences.
There's one big problem with this class, just from what I can tell based on two readings and one meeting. In order to have a system of ethics, you have to have a worldview. The buck has to stop somewhere; typically, this means that you have to have a god or gods involved in the chain of reasoning to define what's moral and what's not. At a minimum, you have to have a set of absolute ideals (you can pull off secular humanism, kind of, by arguing that the good qualities of man are the basis of morality). Scientists are bound and determined not to have any of this, which leads to some absolutely absurd philosophical gesturing.
Take tomorrow's topic of animal research, for example. The chapter begins with the statement that humans seem to instinctively recognize that an animal is different from, say, a test tube, and has some kind of value to it. And then it quotes an anti-animal research guy who argues that all lifeforms have equal intrinsic worth and should not be made to suffer...but having made that point, he goes on to say that if you had a person and a dog in a lifeboat and one of them had to drown, you should toss the dog (thus defeating the entire point he just made)! And then they quote a pro-animal research guy who argues that from an evolutionary standpoint, we're equal to the animals because we're just glorified monkeys, but it doesn't matter because our pain is not necessarily equal in severity to theirs, so do to them what you will. Both people end up in the situation where what they can logically argue contradicts what they know by gut instinct.
Even better (or worse) was the chapter on human subjects research, in which for lack of a worldview they ended up having to make their points on the grounds of law alone. Thus you have to consider the good of the baby if a pregnant woman consents to join a study (because causing harm to a human being for research purposes was forbidden at the Nuremburg Trials), but it's okay to use aborted tissue in research (because abortion is legal in the US).
Having a worldview makes these kinds of problems much easier to solve. Of course the animal has more value than the test tube--it is a creature designed by God. At the same time, of course the person benefitting from the research has more value than the animal--the human being is made in God's image. It's okay to do research on animals because God gave us dominion over them. It's wrong to treat them inhumanely because they're a form of life created by God. And as for the baby problem, a baby is made in the image of God and shouldn't be used for research in any way, shape, or form until it's old enough to give consent. Isn't this much more simple?
My people are nuts.
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| ...that it took me only two HOURS to change my name with the government bureaucracy, but two DAYS to change it at school????????
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| I'm back!
And I'm married!
And it's wonderful, and it's nuts! We had a marvelous honeymoon, and now we're digging ourselves out from under packages and wedding decorations and name change forms and kitchen rearrangements and who only knows what else.
And, for the record, it's totally worth it!
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| ...I did really well on my boards. 
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