Ted Carnahan

In case you haven’t heard the news, there is a new approach to creating stem cells for research, one that does not involve human cloning or the destruction of human embryos. First Things’ Joseph Bottum had this to say about the development:

If the news of major breakthroughs in cell research should turn out to be correct, we are about to witness something like victory in the fight over embryonic stem cells.

And that will open a nest of interesting questions, beginning with this one: All those editorialists and columnists who have, over the past ten years, howled and howled about Luddites and religious fanatics thwarting science and frustrating medicine—were they really interested in technology and health, or were they just using all that as a handy stick with which to whack their political opponents?

You may remember back in the last election I opposed Missouri Amendment 2 because it authorized human cloning and destroyed embryos. Supporters even put Michael J. Fox on television, declaring that embryonic stem cells were the only hope to cure his Parkinson’s disease. But as the First Things article above suggests, support for embryonic stem cell research was not pro-science, it was pro-abortion.

With 2,000,000+ votes cast in 2006, Missouri Amendment 2 passed by less than 50,000 votes. With new science under our belts, perhaps now is a good time to begin efforts to repeal it.

Just a quick one: I finally got tired of clicking through the Wartburg Seminary website, so I made a Firefox Search Shortcut out of the minimum URL needed. Just copy and paste this into a new bookmark in Firefox:

http://library.dbq.edu:8675/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=wts&index=.GW&term=%s

And set the keyword on the shortcut to lib. Then you can type lib Your Mom and get all items in the catalog that are about Your Mom.

The issues of abortion, euthanasia, the war, and political and economic justice place myself and many other people in a trap between the two major political parties in the United States. Often times people like me have been derided as “single issue voters,” though that has never been true for me. The choices involved, presented from a Roman Catholic perspective but holding universal application, are well presented in this article from the First Things blog.

Certainly, a Catholic elected to public office must make prudential judgments on how to best advance the rights and the dignity of the human person. There are many issues, in fact most issues, where Catholic politicians may disagree and adopt different policy positions—a just immigration policy, for example, or public-assistance programs for the poor, or health-care policy, or military engagement, or taxation policies.

At the same time, there are circumstances where to support a particular policy involves approval of an intrinsic evil.

I use Asaph, a lead-sheet creation program for musicians, and I discovered that since upgrading to Gutsy, printing doesn’t work. Apparently this is a common problem, detailed in this bug on Launchpad.

The (albeit ugly) workaround: in Software Sources, add deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main as a “Third Party Source.” Then downgrade to cupsys version 1.2.8-0ubuntu8.

Here’s the simple process for installing Koine Greek input method support for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon:

1. Make sure you have scim installed
2. Add this repository to your apt sources: deb http://packages.sil.org/ubuntu gutsy main
3. sudo aptitude update
4. sudo aptitude install scim-kmfl-imengine kmflcomp
5. Download scim-greek-koine.tar.gz, which contains a KMFL engine file I got from somewhere else that I have modified to work.
6. Extract the tarfile and compile the kmfl file by running kmflcomp GrkPolyComp.KMN
7. Run scim-setup, click on the new “KMFL” option, click install, browse to the GrkPolyComp.kmfl file you just compiled.

It was a twisty road to get to this point, so if it doesn’t work for you, post in the comments and I’ll try to help you work it out.