Down The Memory Hole?

I just reread the article cited in my earlier post on Magaw being sacked, because of one of the comments.

Magaw’s strained relationship with Congress, airport operators and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta ( news – web sites) prompted Mineta to ask him to leave, government sources said Thursday.

Gee, Norm, wasn’t it you that said something like “his background and experience make him the perfect candidate for the job” when you appointed him a few months ago? I don’t have the exact quote, because when I google your appointment speech, it comes up “Page Not Found” at the DOT web site.

It’s nice to be able to change inconvenient histories, I guess, when you’re a cabinet secretary. No embarrassing backtracking required that way.

More Ted Williams

Here’s another article that does nothing to clarify what Ted Williams actually wanted. But if he signed up himself, why aren’t the children producing the documentation?

And here’s another article stating that he had no interest in it when he was healthier.

Alcor will take (or at least in the past has taken) patients who were signed up by their families after a declaration of death, but they don’t like to have to deal with messy contentious situations like this. It’s possible that they didn’t know that the daughter would be opposed, and fight it.

And while I’ve said before that if it were up to me, the default in all cases would be cryonic suspension, I certainly wouldn’t force it on someone who didn’t want it (while I consider a refusal to take such measures a form of suicide, I believe that people have a right to suicide). If the son and executor can’t produce some evidence of Williams’ desire to be suspended other than their own word, given the evidence to the contrary, at least from the reportage to date, if I were the judge, I’d allow him to be cremated.

Another Religious Attack On Cryonics

In this opinion piece by Uwe Siemon-Netto, he attacks cryonicists’ attempts to prolong their lives as, among other things, “unethical,” “immoral,” “abhorrent,” “selfish,” and something that only an atheist would do.

For faithful Jews, sticking a dead man in a tank and perhaps experimenting with him is abhorrent because it disturbs the eternal rest of the departed. To Christians, it is singularly egregious because it mocks the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life,” as the Nicene Creed defines the third person in the Trinity.

He, like many, continues to miss the point. Calling these people “dead,” is an opinion, not a fact. Just what life-saving measures would he not consider an affront to God, and which ones will he refuse if the circumstances arise?

A Cryonics (Non) Worry

Kevin McGehee is concerned about someone in cryonic suspension somehow retaining consciousness and going mad, like someone in a perpetual sensory deprivation chamber.

I’m not, for at least two reasons.

First, the suspendee is given a heavy dose of barbiturates to prevent any pain that occurs during the temporary resuscitation necessary to circulate the anti-freeze. Since the body doesn’t metabolize in suspension, this drugged state would persist until the body is repaired and revived.

Second, I find the notion that a body frozen at that temperature, with no ability for synapses to fire, could possibly have any consciousness at all to be much more unlikely than even the prospects for future reanimation.

There may be some good reasons not to be suspended, but this isn’t one that I would even consider.

And A Non-Space Anniversary

Nine years ago today, White House counsel Vince Foster’s dead body was found in Fort Marcy park, outside of Washington, DC. And despite (or more correctly, because of) Ken Starr’s incompetent travesty of an investigation into the matter, the cause and location of his demise remains unknown.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!