An Opera-tunity to Support the Arts

First, listen: "I'd Like To Go Away Alone", composed by Philip Koplow as part of the cantata "We Are Here!" The lyrics come from a poem by Alena Synkova, an inmate of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. This recording is from the world premiere on May 2, 2010, in Cincinnati.

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I'd like to go away alone.
Where there are other, nicer people,
Somewhere into the far unknown,
There, where no one kills another.

Maybe more of us,
A thousand strong,
Will reach this goal
Before too long.

Now, meet the singer:


This is Anna Egan, a 20-year-old soprano studying Vocal Performance at Northern Kentucky University. She's taking that voice on the road, too: this May, she's heading to Salzburg, Austria for a six-week summer session in Opera, Music History, and all the other esoterica the young artist needs to be rounded. Though the program covers the cost of tuition, she has to raise more than $4000 for plane fare, room and board, meals, etc. And the first $1000 is due by March 15!

So if you've ever wanted to be a patron of the arts but didn't know where to begin, here's your chance: a real live starving artist!

There are approximately 51 meals that are not covered for the duration of our trip. That's a lot of food to make up for, so I need to call for reinforcements.

For 15$, you can sponsor a meal that I eat in Austria. You can even get a group together and sponsor multiple meals or just send a donation towards the total cost of my trip. (Either way you have my love and undying belief in your awesomeness, which I already have. ;) )

For 20$, you can sponsor an entire day, and any sight-seeing or activities that I do I will take photos of, especially for you!

For every meal or thing that you sponsor, I will send you a photo of that meal, as well as an anecdote of my time in a foreign culture and a progress update as to my studies and performances. You will have a direct impact on the life of a budding young artist, as well as a little "taste" of life in Europe.

Every little bit helps. Even a dollar adds up when there are many of them.

Read more about her trip here, including details of how to contribute.

(Full and honest disclosure: this is my little sister, guys. But the girl can sing.)

Does Giving Women a Year's Supply of The Pill Reduce Abortions?

A reader asked me to take a look at this study (abstract here) and see if it reaches a valid set of conclusions. The study was conducted in California among ~80,000 women who receive birth control pills paid for by the state as part of a program for low income women. Previously, women in the program have received a 1 or 3 months supply of birth control at a time, and then have to go in to the clinic in order to receive a refill. In the study, a portion of these women were given a full year's supply instead of one or three months, and state medical records were then used to see if this resulted in a change in the rate of unplanned pregnancy and abortion among the women who received a full year supply of birth control.

Researchers observed a 30 percent reduction in the odds of pregnancy and a 46 percent decrease in the odds of an abortion in women given a one-year supply of birth control pills at a clinic versus women who received the standard prescriptions for one – or three-month supplies.

The researchers speculate that a larger supply of oral contraceptive pills may allow more consistent use, since women need to make fewer visits to a clinic or pharmacy for their next supply.

"Women need to have contraceptives on hand so that their use is as automatic as using safety devices in cars, " said Diana Greene Foster, PhD, lead author and associate professor in the UCSF Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences. "Providing one cycle of oral contraceptives at a time is similar to asking people to visit a clinic or pharmacy to renew their seatbelts each month."
...
Oral contraceptive pills are the most commonly used method of reversible contraception in the United States, the team states. While highly effective when used correctly (three pregnancies per 1,000 women in the first year of use), approximately half of women regularly miss one or more pills per cycle, a practice associated with a much higher pregnancy rate (80 pregnancies per 1,000 women in the first year of use), according to the team. [source]

The details of that decrease are as follows:

Women who received a 1-year supply were less likely to have a pregnancy (1.2% compared with 3.3% of women getting three cycles of pills and 2.9% of women getting one cycle of pills). Dispensing a 1-year supply is associated with a 30% reduction in the odds of conceiving an unplanned pregnancy compared with dispensing just one or three packs (confidence interval [CI] 0.57–0.87) and a 46% reduction in the odds of an abortion (95% CI 0.32–0.93), controlling for age, race or ethnicity, and previous pill use.[source]

So, what should a Catholic pro-lifer make of this?

Well, there may or may not have been methodological issues with this study. I read several science news stories about it, but I can't get access to the full text, so I don't know for sure how they dealt with sample bias, etc. However, I have to admit, that from what I've read it makes sense to me that the study results are valid as far as they go. But they also give us a window into the contraceptive mentality which is at play in feeding into abortion in this culture.

The women in the study are receiving birth control so that they can have sex at will while not getting pregnant. Nevertheless, some percentage of them are getting pregnant (around 1% of those getting the year supply, around 3% of the rest) during any given year. The good news is that they are like the rest of California women in that in 80% of these cases, they are carrying these unexpected children to term. The bad news is that 20% of the time they choose an abortion instead.

But part of what's feeding this problem is not the quantity of birth control that's being given out at a time, but the sense in which people's actions are (for whatever reason) not fitting with their desires. One article on the study includes this telling quote:

“It's a cost-savings thing, but it's also a quality-of-care issue — and it's the right thing to do,” she says. “People don't stop having sex when their pills run out.”

So people are taking birth control pills in order to have sex while not getting pregnant, but if they run out of pills -- they don't stop having sex.

The study's proposed solution to this is "let's just make sure they always have lots of birth control on hand" and I suppose in the context of them taking birth control, I really don't have any strong feelings about whether they get a month's supply or a years supply at a time. But it seems to me that we're looking at the root of a much deeper issue when we hear someone conducting a study on this topic saying that people do not appear to stop having sex when they run out of birth control -- even if they know it's only the birth control that's keeping them from getting pregnant as a result of having sex.

All other things staying constant, if it's true (as the study appears to indicate) that some women on birth control are late in refilling their prescriptions and thus gap out for a few days, yet continue having sex as normal (or abstain during the couple days they don't have pills, but then go back to having sex as normal as soon as they start taking the pills again without realizing that the unexpected fertility might well come a week or two after the gap, not during it) then it's pretty logical that reducing the frequency with which women have the potential to experience that gap would reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies. And if we assume that the same percentage of unplanned pregnancies will always result in abortions, then necessarily reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies will reduce the number of abortions.

I think this does suggest that for those people who are in the business of dispensing birth control pills, it would be an obvious thing for them to dispense large prescriptions, and perhaps to look into some sort of automatic reminder or shipment in order to help women avoid these gaps. Women who are coming to them for birth control obviously don't want to get pregnant, and they will do a better job of fulfilling those women's wishes if they help them avoid those gaps.

I don't think we pro-lifers who have moral objections to birth control need to go out and become cheerleaders for the idea of handing out larger prescriptions of The Pill -- though in light of this study I think we shouldn't actively try to keep birth control dispensers from dispensing larger amounts at a time. The moral content of taking birth control is the same regardless of how much you pick up at a time and the larger prescription amounts seem to have, on the whole, positive results from everyone's point of view.

I think the role for us as pro-lifers is two fold:

First, either way, we believe that everyone will be better off if abortion is simply not on the table. (For those birth control enthusiasts, this might even result in some more conscientious pill taking.) This clearly makes no different in our fight to remove abortion from the set of legal medical options.

Second, our society is clearly both confused and dysfunctional when it comes to sex, if we have a lot of people who are taking birth control in order to avoid getting pregnant yet don't stop having sex if they run out of birth control. The birth control advocates who are the sources of this study are going to be no help in solving these problems, because their whole worldview is built around the idea that sex should be totally separate from reproduction. It is up to us to build the cultural understanding that sex results in new human life, and that even "protected" sex does some percentage of the time. If you are having sex, you had better be sure that it is with a person whom you are willing to have a child with -- even if you're taking measure to reduce the likelihood of that happening in any given year down to around 1%. One person out of a hundred is still a pretty significant group of people, and a number of years your chances of ending up with a child at some point only go up.

The Elder Son

Some fiction for your Friday...

Yes, well. Of course you know the story, the story of my younger brother, in which I play the foil's part. Advanced inheritance; dissolution: wine, women, gambling, banquets, all the usual; money exhausted; the dramatic return; and his father's -- our father's -- joyful forgiveness. It's not a story, I realize, in which I come off well. I assure you I'm at least self aware enough to know that. I'm not here to make excuses. The grand emotional appeals have always been my brother's forte anyway. And at this remove, however much I may see myself as the hero of my own story, I know that it is my brother who holds a special appeal to people.

He, of course, is telling no stories now. He is in that eternal moment which needs no telling and is untellable. While I, always ahead and so always behind, am here to talk to you.

You will be thinking, by now, that I am "just" a fictional character. That would, I sometimes think in my still unperfected state, have been a comfort. Then I would have been "the elder son" and nothing more. But no. I am as real as any other invention of the divine mind. And so, naturally, my brother and I were followers of the Savior. Yes, me too. I could always be relied on to keep the accounts and purchase food to be distributed to the widows and orphans, to re-read the letters of the Apostles to the children or the catechumens and offer up my own -- perhaps over-smug -- thoughts on them. I was a linchpin, invaluable for my organizational skills, if I may so confess. And my brother. Well, he stole the money from the charitable purse -- no, not for the reason I've let you think, for a satisfying moment, by saying that. He stole the money and gave it all away at once. My weekly distributions were so orderly, but he gave it all away. I, on the other hand, worried about how we'd find the money to feed the widows the next week.

I clung to system and sense and frowned on those who were swept away by their feelings about the Savior -- in part because I have seldom been blessed with any such feelings myself. I could fast and give away my possessions with the best of them, but unlike the best of them I did so because I thought it was the right thing, not because I believed it was.

Thinking. Calculating. Reasoning. These were the things I was comfortable with. And the regularity of discipline. When the persecutions came, under Nero, I organized our community. I planned a new meeting place each week, secret passwords, people were not to go about in groups, no strangers to be admitted. I was determined not to lose a single one of those entrusted to my care. And my brother. He had a different determination. He was determined to preach the faith to the legionaries.

Well. That worked out. And if there's any single thing I can be proud of it's that when dragged before the governor I did not deny the Savior. Though I soiled myself while remaining silent. And bit my tongue quite viciously.

My brother prayed for our persecutors as we hung there. I cursed them, and shouted that the Romans had no business in Judea, that we were a free people and would always be such even if only in the freedom of death. His grand gesture was more in keeping with our maker than was mine. I'm sure that when he saw The Presence, he rushed forward, impulsive and childish as he always was. I held back, not turning away from that I longed for, but too proud to rush forward when I could have wished that someone, at last, would rush to me and say, "Welcome back, my favorite son."

And so here, neither coming nor going, I stay. Waiting. Trying to bend my will I thought so well-formed so that it will conform to the One which it loves imperfectly.

Perhaps, if you find time -- I can't say that I'm the most exciting project, I understand that there are far more who hold out hope for Judas or for Nero than for me, if only because so few know that I am something other than "a parable" -- dispatch a prayer or two for me. That some day I can overcome my wish that He would recognize how hard I've worked in my stolid way for him, and instead rush forward myself as my brother did so long ago and say, "Father, I have sinned."

Kasparov on the Significance of AI Playing Jeopardy!

Over at The Atlantic they have an interesting little exclusive with Garry Kasparov (who has a little experience with the man vs. machine thing) providing his reactions to IBM supercomputer Watson's victory in Jeopardy!:

• A convincing victory under strict parameters, and if we stay within those limits Watson can be seen as an incremental advance in how well machines understand human language. But if you put the questions from the show into Google, you also get good answers, even better ones if you simplify the questions. To me, this means Watson is doing good job of breaking language down into points of data it can mine very quickly, and that it does it slightly better than Google does against the entire Internet.

• Much like how computers play chess, reducing the algorithm into "crunchable" elements can simulate the way humans do things in the result even though the computer's method is entirely different. If the result—the chess move, the Jeopardy answer—is all that matters, it's a success. If how the result is achieved matters more, I'm not so sure. For example, Deep Blue had no real impact on chess or science despite the hype surrounding its sporting achievement in defeating me. If Watson's skills can be translated into something useful, something groundbreaking, that is the test. If all it can do is beat humans on a game show Watson is just a passing entertainment akin to the wind-up automata of the 18th century.

• My concern about its utility, and I read they would like it to answer medical questions, is that Watson's performance reminded me of chess computers. They play fantastically well in maybe 90% of positions, but there is a selection of positions they do not understand at all. Worse, by definition they do not understand what they do not understand and so cannot avoid them. A strong human Jeopardy! player, or a human doctor, may get the answer wrong, but he is unlikely to make a huge blunder or category error—at least not without being aware of his own doubts. We are also good at judging our own level of certainty. A computer can simulate this by an artificial confidence measurement, but I would not like to be the patient who discovers the medical equivalent of answering "Toronto" in the "US Cities" category, as Watson did.

• I would not like to downplay the Watson team's achievement, because clearly they did something most did not yet believe possible. And IBM can be lauded for these experiments. I would only like to wait and see if there is anything for Watson beyond Jeopardy!. These contests attract the popular imagination, but it is possible that by defining the goals so narrowly they are aiming too low and thereby limit the possibilities of their creations.

From all I can tell, the only really interesting technological advances indicated by Watson's victory are in the ability of a computer to discern a spoken question and it's approach to trying to ascertain the meaning of that question. In both cases, Watson's approach is utterly alien to human intelligence, and in many ways just underscores how different human thought and what a computer does are.

Links Round-up

1. If you're following the whole dispute throughout the Catholic blogsphere on the efficacy of lying (springing from Live Action's stings on Planned Parenthood clinics) Brandon at Siris has, for my money, the clearest writing on the situation.

UPDATE: A friend wrote me in a message:

"What struck me the most about the Lila Rose case was not the issue of whether it's okay to lie in certain cases, but the idea that it's okay to lie to certain people because they're scum, anyway. 'We're better than you, so it doesn't really matter if we treat you like crap.'"

Also, for the sophisticate who entertains, he offers Immanuel Kant's rules for a good dinner party.

2. The Manolo is also laying down some ground rules, in regards to beauty.

3. Bearing has up a fine post on what makes gluttony gluttony.

We've been over this before: we can be a glutton by eating too expensively, too daintily ("pickily"), too much, too soon, or too eagerly. This is a nice categorization because it expands the usual definition of gluttony, but it still leaves us asking: But Thomas, what do you mean by "too" anything? If one can eat "too" expensively, then surely one can eat "just expensively enough," and so forth. Where is the line? How do we know when we've crossed over from eating promptly, to eating "too soon?" Eating with relish, and eating "too eagerly?" Selecting good food and being a glutton of pickiness?

I think the answer is that gluttony, like most concupiscence, abhors restraint; what makes gluttony different from other vices, such as sloth or lust is that the restraints it abhors all have to do with food. Different people live under different sets of restraints, some more stringent than others; and different times call for different restraints; so the boundaries of gluttony cannot be defined clearly as a set of rules that are appropriate for everyone. And so eating quite a lot of food, or eating expensive food, or eating at odd times, isn't inherently gluttonous; what makes it gluttonous is if the eater is supposed to be exercising restraint, but isn't.

She's the best food writer I know.

4. Speaking of the good and the beautiful, I want to eat this tiramisu. Because one can only take so much dieting.

5. Jake Tawney at Roma Locuta Est writes about the teachers' union strikes in Wisconsin from the perspective of a Catholic teacher in a public school.

The result of this is that I am now an outsider on the inside. I am a non-union member in a profession that demands union membership. I don’t say this with regret, and I am certainly not looking for pity; I am well aware of having made my proverbial bed. Principled stands have consequences, and if I were to whine about the consequences of my actions, I would not be living up to the iconic ideal of my father. And believe me when I tell you that I desperately want to make my father as proud of me as I am of him. It doesn’t, however, change the objective fact that I am a scab, and moments like Senate Bill 5 make that abundantly clear.

I can’t tell you what I think of the bill, because quite frankly I don’t know. I know that the Catholic Church supports unions in principle, and out of obedience I abide by that teaching. I hardly think, though, that the Church approves of what unions have become in our country, which in part includes immoral political stances.

Those interested in the new translation of the Mass that's being implemented come Advent should be reading Jake's New Translation Monday series. This week he covers the first half of the Gloria.

6. The National Catholic Register has added a number of new bloggers lately. Don't miss Simcha Fisher on Why I Love My Ugly Little Liturgy or Jennifer Fulwiler writing about 4 Tips for Using Graphic Abortion Images Effectively.

7. Emily J. at Back Bay View shares eight practical tips for protecting your marriage. Emily's family is being posted to Guam, so she knows a thing or two about keeping your marriage strong during momentous life changes.

In Praise of the Single Man

It's become fashionable lately to bash single guys as slacking, media-obsessed slobs who live in a haze of extended adolescence. These young men feel that the rise of the educated career woman who snuggles up with a good IVF treatment to get her maternal fix (because all the single guys out there are slacking, media-obsessed slobs unworthy of fatherhood) takes them off the hook for any kind of accelerated maturing process, and so they revel in their lack of commitment while drinking beer and developing bromances with their best buds.

Anyway, that seems to be the thesis of Kay Hymowitz's article in today's WSJ, entitled Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.

Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.

Single men have never been civilization's most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with "Star Wars" posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn't be surprised.

Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.

I find this kind of blanket condemnation irritating. I will never deny that I live in a Catholic sub-culture, but I get out of the house every now and then, and I want to state for the record: I do not know these guys.

I know a quantity of single guys from various backgrounds. Some I knew in college, some are old friends, some I know through online connections, and some are my very own brothers. These guys aren't jerks or slackers -- they're some of the hardest-working people I know. (They party hard, too, but who exactly is going to begrudge that of someone who can get away with it? I myself would party more if I had the opportunity.) All of them are highly educated and gainfully employed. They're looking for the right girl, but they don't participate in any kind of hook-up culture. These men are intelligent and fairly pleasant to look at and generally free of complexes or issues.

Don't give me any of this "Why are they still single, then?" guff. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a high-school sweetheart or meet the right girl in college. Marriage isn't just an abstract concept -- it involves a particular other person. Education, employment, personality, and smarts make it more plausible that the right person will be attracted to the possessor of these virtues, but they can't conjure up a mate when no existing candidate is simpatico. These guys are single as Darwin or I might still be single if we hadn't happened to meet.

Incidentally, my single male friends are practicing Catholics, which likely puts them head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of responsibility, morality, and respect for women.

I'm sure that these slacker dudes exist -- Darwin notes that he knew some guys at his previous company, a big tech concern, who met some of Ms. Hymowitz's standards for pre-adulthood males. But I don't see it, and I'm tired of most unmarried males being lumped into this uber-jerk category. Just as I'm tired of the "women today are so educated and discriminating that they don't need guys" trope -- these easy stereotypes seem to be literary contrivances that don't address the cheapening of sexual standards which make it so hard for men and women to pursue and find true value in members of the opposite gender.

(And let's bust another myth: the lazy gamer single guy. The hard-core gamers I know are mostly married men whose wives are very tolerant. The single guys know that girls aren't impressed by a man who's glued to a game console, and act accordingly. Some of them are even that rara avis, a guy who doesn't game at all. Ladies, take note.)

This Issue's A Bust

Once in a while the political news circuit gets stuck on a topic so amazingly trivial and foolish that the spectacle of such a large tempest raging in such a small teapot makes it hard to look away. This week, the leading ladies of the right and left have decided to fight it out over breastfeeding.

I picked this for obvious reasons, but the parent in me says "No diaper and white dress: Watch Out!"

How, you might ask, could something like breastfeeding become a hot political issue? It seems that as part of her Let's Move program to reduce childhood obesity, Michelle Obama has decided to promote breastfeeding. A nurse-in at the White House? No, that might actually be interesting. Rather, the proposal is for the IRS to grant a tax deduction for breast pumps and other nursing supplies.

Seeing a chance to turn a phrase, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have weighed in, saying that getting the government involved in breastfeeding is the ultimate in "nanny state" politics. And this has given political commentators on the left the chance to weigh in with "Palin attacks breastfeeding" and "Bachmann says government has no business telling women what choices to make about their bodies" type headlines.

Frankly, this strikes me as one of the silliest topics to have a political fight over, ever. The proposal itself is laughably ineffective. A quick glance down Amazon shows current prices for popular breast pumps ranging from $50 for the basic battery operated model to around $300 for the "Medela Pump In Style Advanced Breast Pump with Metro Bag".

Now, I'll be the first to agree that $300 would be a significant outlay for many working class moms having to go back to work while their babies are still nursing. But let's think for a moment about how a tax deduction works. You still have to shell out for the breast pump yourself. You save the receipt, and months later when you do your taxes you get to take that $300 off of your reported income. This doesn't lower the amount of tax you pay (or as people usually think of it: increase the amount you get back) by $300, though. It decreases your taxable income. The maximum amount you would "get back" months after the fact would be your top marginal tax rate times $300. If you're middle class or working class, that would be 15%. So you'd get $45 dollars back for the $300 you spent, but only months later.

Perhaps I'm overly skeptical, but I find it hard to imagine this would cause lots of working class mothers who would otherwise have given their kids formula instead of breastmilk once they returned to work to think, "Wow. I could really do this. And it comes with a 'metro bag' too. That will make it all work out!" (Not to discount the virtues of a metro bag. I mean, couldn't we all use a little more metro in our lives?)

The thing is, the main costs of breatfeeding your child are not monetary, especially for a mother who is having to work away from her child for a standard set of works hours. The main costs relate to time and trouble. And there's no way that a tax deduction can solve that problem.

So the proposal is, I think, pretty clearly so ineffective in achieving its purported aims as to be deeply silly. Which makes the attempt to grab headlines by opposing it also a quite silly. While I can agree with the desire to keep the tax code simpler, that's a horse that left the stable a long time ago and this sort of empty posturing is going to cost the government virtually nothing, since a truly minimal number of people will ever use it.

Now if Mrs. Obama really wants to generate awareness for breastfeeding, I think that nurse-in idea at the White House has some merits. Just picture a thousand nursing mothers on the White House lawn. Nurse for America!

At the very least, it would make for better pictures than that characteristic "anger shots" which reporters can't help illustrating their stories with when they write about the female public figures arguing. And after all: