Laughing last, laughing best

Eternal Earth-Bound Pets is an atheist-operated business that will rescue and adopt ("save") the pets of those who are called to heaven during the Rapture. They charge $135 for the first pet and $20 for each additional pet. And the best part is, all sales are final and no refunds honored, for any reason. From their web site:

"If subscriber loses his/her faith and/or the Rapture occurs and subscriber is not Raptured (aka is 'left behind') EE-BP disclaims any liability; no refund will be tendered."

Wait, I was wrong. The best part is, they already have 259 clients, which means they've made at least $35,000. I'm sure they'll sucker--I mean, comfort--plenty more between now and Saturday May 21st, the latest alleged Doomsday.

From the AFP article via Yahoo News:

When judgment day happens, Eternal Earth-Bound Pets co-founder Bart Centre "will notify all of our rescuers to go into action and they will drive to the homes of anyone who's signed a contract with us, pick up their pets and take them home and adopt them as their own, keeping them happy and healthy for the rest of their lives.

"This will happen only if and when the Rapture happens. So we do not expect to have to do anything on Saturday," Centre told AFP.

I can't stop laughing about this.

A question about transhumanism

Should improvement be imposed on the unwilling? Did we do the right thing by cutting our boy?

Discuss.

A culture of ethical failure

Between 2002 and 2006, members of the 55-person Denver office of the Minerals Management Service received gifts, such as ski trips and dinners, as well as straight-up cash tips while the head—Gregory Smith—used "illegal drugs and had sex with subordinates." The MMS awards and oversees the ability to take oil, natural gas, minerals and other goods from properties controlled by the federal government, such as offshore waters or federal lands in the West.

The scandal is not just confined to Denver, either, the report says. At least 12 other Interior Department employees rigged contracts in favor of particular oil companies, were employed by said companies as consultants and/or had sex with oil company employees. |Scientific American|

"The government employees who oversee off-shore oil drilling are literally and figuratively in bed with big oil," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.

The reports from the OIG are available here.

Breaking...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush said in an interview out Tuesday that he quit playing golf in 2003 out of respect for the families of US soldiers killed in the conflict in Iraq, now in its sixth year.

"I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he said in an interview for Yahoo! News and Politico magazine.

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them." |Yahoo News>|

Discipline and self-sacrifice truly are the watchwords of this President. In case you were wondering, mountain biking is still okey dokey:

Although Bush says he has given up golf, he is a mountain-biking enthusiast who has been photographed taking part in rides. He took up biking after an injury sidelined him from running. |Washington Post|

(via)

Without raising any questions of conscience

Yesterday, while being lectured on the virtues of turning off unnecessary lights, I found myself thinking about carbon taxes. One of the reasons that I don't find appeals to personal environmental virtue very compelling is that I hold the heretical (for a radical) view that the various environmental problems that face us can best be addressed through market based solutions. The basic problem, as I see it, is that free markets have failed to appropriately distribute environmental costs because those costs are treated as externalities rather than included in transaction prices. The solution therefore lies in regulations which correct these failings of free markets.

A question, then, is what to think of environmental nagging. On the one hand, widespread sensitivity to the environmental impact of our choices is likely to enhance the political prospects of the sorts of reforms that I favor. On the other hand, self-righteous prigs are annoying as fuck. It's a pickle.

I don't wanna play anymore...

"You euthanized your faithful companion cube faster than any test subject on record. Congratulations!"

Suck it

Speaking of medical interventions in human flourishing, I've been wondering if our attitudes towards performance enhancing drugs in sports track our attitudes towards cosmetic surgery in daily life. Liposuction, to take one example, seems to be disapproved of (or at least riduculed) in most circles, and this even though many of us are carrying around more fat than we'd care to. My suspicion is that disapproval of liposuction stems from its status as a short cut. Physical fitness, the thinking goes, is attractive at least partly because it provides evidence of personal virtue, but the person who appears fit after liposuction hasn't led a virtuous life at all. On the contrary, the mere fact that they have lost weight through surgery rather than exercise seems to demonstrate that they lack the discipline to master their appetites.

It's important to be very clear here. The disapproval of liposuction is seperable from the disapproval of gluttony. That is, it has primarily to do with the feeling that the liposuction patient has gotten something that he didn't deserve.

As it happens, I'm pretty skeptical of the notion of desert, so I'm not convinced that this gives us a good reason to disapprove of liposuction. That's really no surprise though, since I can't quite understand why people object to the use of steroids by athletes, and that seems to be the performance enhancing drug that most closely tracks the liposuction case.

As cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes

I suspect that most of you aren't particularly excited about Danilo Di Luca's victory in the Giro d'Italia. Perhaps this is because you assume that any achievement in the sport of cycling is necessarily tainted by the spectre of performance enhancing drugs.

My view of the matter is a little different, and though I understand that there's probably nothing to be gained by arguing about it, here's something that confuses me. When dealing with sickness, we generally consider treatments with drugs to be less radical than surgical interventions. In sport, however, things seem to be reversed. An athlete can undergo mulitiple surgeries without anyone raising an eyebrow, but the use of steroids or EPO sparks worries about the legitimacy and authenticity of athletic performance.

I have heard the argument that performance enhancing drugs, unlike surgical interventions, change the essence of the athlete. Metaphysically I'm not sure what to make of this, but that's neither here nor there. The root of the idea seems to be that surgeries restore capacities lost through injury whereas performance enhancing drugs create formerly nonexistant capacities in an illegitimate way. But even leaving aside difficulties about the creation of capacities^[1], this doesn't seem to be an accurate description of the workings of all performance enhancing drugs. Many of the most effective performance enhancing drugs, that is, achieve their ends by artificially increasing an athlete's ability to recover from the physical stresses of competition or training. What's wrong with that?

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1 New capacities can be created in various ways, but not all of these methods are frowned upon. For example, creating new capacities through mere training or practice is thought to be legitimate, and obviously so, but it's not clear (to me at least) why. Moreover, there are surgical interventions (Tommy John Surgery, Lasik) which are treated as unobjectionable even though they create capacities.