What wins when money clashes with religious doctrine?

That is, of course, a question that practically answers itself. Via reader Vote for Pedro I learned about a court case arising from a tragic situation in 2006 when a woman who was seven months pregnant with twins started vomiting and was short of breath and was admitted to the emergency room of a Colorado hospital run by the Catholic church. The obstetrician on call did not answer his page and the woman died within the hour and the twins did not survive either. [Read more…]

Looking for Atlas

So you read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and inspired by their powerful message of the virtue of selfishness and the vice of altruism, you have sworn off having anything to do with the moochers and looters who are trying to live off the hard-earned rewards of your own genius. But you now feel lonely because there are so few pure Randian objectivists around and none of the people in your present circle seem willing to take you up on your generous offer to loan them 1,000 page novels containing turgid prose and two-dimensional characters. What is a maker to do? [Read more…]

Film review: Game Change (2012)

Over the weekend I saw this film about the ill-fated McCain-Palin campaign of 2008. The film is based on a book of the same name by two journalists who relied heavily on anonymous sources on ‘deep background’, which means that one has to be wary of the material that took place out of the public eye or was not reported previously, and treat it with some skepticism. As a film I found it entertaining and engrossing even though I was very familiar with the entire narrative. I was not particularly surprised by any of the information in it but then I am a bit of a political junkie and followed that election pretty closely. With that knowledge I can say that events portrayed in the film were largely consistent with my understanding of the people and events. [Read more…]

On sentence spacing and serial commas

All my life, when typing I followed a period at the end of a sentence with just a single blank space before starting the next sentence. It never crossed my mind to do otherwise. But I did occasionally notice that some people left two blank spaces instead of one and on one occasion I was told that it was I who was doing it all wrong and defying the proper convention. I simply ignored that reproof and continued being a one-space writer. [Read more…]