waka waka waka

Feeling tired? Listless? Maybe all you need is some concentrated water. Just add water.

Read the rest of this entry »

Democracy has obvious drawbacks, not least of which being that at its worst it is nothing more than mob rule. As William Alger said, “a crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.” So the leader of a democracy, depending upon his aims and his talents, can seek to lead by addressing his people as individuals amenable to reasoned argument and capable of rational deliberation — or he can appeal to their sentiment, their prejudices, their greed, their pride, and their social allegiances in all their coarsest forms.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, June 30th, marks the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event, an immense cataclysm that occurred, mercifully, in a remote and mostly uninhabited region of central Siberia. Its cause is still debated, but it is generally agreed to have been an “air burst”, equivalent to 10 or 15 megatons of TNT, that occurred at an altitude of about five miles.

Over the years various explanations have been attempted. The most likely is a strike by a meteoroid or comet fragment, but some have imagined that the cause was a black hole or blob of antimatter passing through the Earth, or even a UFO crash. A more recent, if dubious, hypothesis is that the Event was caused by a titanic release of methane gas.

Whatever it was, it was a stupendous detonation; if it had happened a few hours later, once western Europe had rotated into the descending object’s path, it might have pulverized a major city. As it was, very few died, and otherwise it merely knocked over a great many trees.

But now we learn (with a hat tip to reader JK) that there may have been other consequences as well. Vladimir Shaidurov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has raised the possibility that the Tunguska Event may be to blame for the apparent global warming of the last century. Water vapor is a more influential greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and Shaidurov suggests that it may have been not human emission of carbon dioxide, but rather the Tunguska object’s effect on high-altitude ice clouds, that altered the planet’s heat economy.

Learn more here.

From my friend Wayne Krantz comes a link to a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times: apparently some of Barack Obama’s younger and more enthusiastic supporters, having noticed that his middle name — Hussein — has been a heavy cross to bear, have decided to make it their own middle name as well.

This comes as Mr. Obama continues to be vexed by rumors that he is a closeted Muslim. He appears, quite reasonably, to regard these allegations as slanderous calumny (which they almost certainly are), and has done all he can to distance himself from that troublesome religion — including going so far as to have a pair of bescarfed Muslimahs removed from the stage during a recent campaign appearance. For him actually to be a Muslim, of course, would be political suicide: it would be hard to imagine anything more viscerally repugnant to the average US voter, short of being a rational secularist with no religion at all. (That said, there is in fact one Muslim member of Congress: Representative Keith Ellison, a Farrakhan supporter who represents the anomalously tolerant district of Minneapolis — but the politically astute Mr. Obama has so far had the good sense to fend him off with a boathook whenever he approaches.)

One girl’s father was appalled, his heart blackened by fear that his daughter might actually be converting to Islam. But he needn’t have worried: it’s all in good fun, of course. Whee!!

Read the story here.

I do almost all of my written correspondence by email these days. I’ve always liked communicating in writing, and I generally take email-writing as seriously as I ever did letter-writing. I’m not one of those people who writes emails like:

dude u wanna go 2 the game? I got sum tix lemme know

I appreciate the objectivity and re-readability of the written word, but the latency of paper mail makes for conversations that seem very slow indeed these days, so I hardly ever send any.

Read the rest of this entry »

This just in, from the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.

…Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

The Constitution does not permit “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home,” Scalia said.

Well done.

In response to yesterday’s item about punitive sterilization, a reader e-mails:

I think maybe the main problems are that it is an extreme punishment, taking away an obviously fundamental “right,” and the irreversibility issue in a world of inaccurate justice. In that regard, it is outside the penal philosophy of “rehabilitation,” … which should be part of any criminal justice system.

I suppose the eugenics problem comes from identifying “bad” genes. … I don’t know that I have any problem with temporary sterilization. I don’t want to take the time to think through the tension between people whose crimes are so bad they’re going to be locked up forever (in which case they wouldn’t seem to need sterilization) and people somehow deserving of being sterilized forever. Probably it requires too fine a moral judgment of the convicted: that they are capable of posing no threat to society, but some combination of their genes and child-raising skills would still result in such danger.

Good comments. Perhaps the topic isn’t as beyond-the-pale as I had thought it was.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some topics seem to be entirely off limits for discussion these days. Often, they are ideas that not all that long ago were not only not taboo, but were embraced at the highest levels of progressive academia and government, right here in the USA. To the philosophically minded, though, there are no off-limits topics — and to the anthropologically curious, taboos can be importantly revealing phenomena. So here’s something I wonder about.

Read the rest of this entry »

Someone mentioned the author Jerome Bixby today, and it brought to mind his short story It’s A Good Life — which I think is the most horrifying piece of fiction I have ever read. I looked to see if anyone had posted it online, and indeed someone has. If you haven’t read it, it’s here. But I warn you: it will stay with you.

In scattered posts over the past weeks, we’ve been circling warily around the ancient puzzle of free will, looking from various angles at some of the opinions, beliefs, worries, and wishful thinking that inform our opinions on this vexatious topic. The biggest worry, it seems, is the threat to our moral responsibility posed by the possibility — which is almost certainly true — that our brains, and therefore our minds and our choices, are fully embedded parts of the world’s causal web. But is there really anything to fear?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, so soon after the death of Tim Russert, we must sadly note the death of another nimble and influential mind: George Carlin. He was only 71.

There’s a piece in today’s Times Magazine that is so breathtakingly misbegotten that I am reduced nearly to speechlessness. I had thought of giving it a thorough, line-by-line fisking, but as blogger Steve Sailer also realized upon reading it, it simply stands on it own, a fantastic self-caricature. It is, essentially, an argument that European culture is morally culpable for the crime of reluctance to abet its own destruction. One brief quote stood out above all, and will give you an idea of the tone of the essay:

[A] hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures — even intolerant ones.

Ah yes, of course: to be good secular liberals we must “respect”, and welcome into our midst, even cultures that implacably advocate the subjugation or destruction of our own. It’s our “hallmark”, after all.

Complete your education here.

There was a heartening item on the Washington Post’s editorial page a couple of days ago, describing a conversation between Barack Obama and the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. Mr. Obama, who prior to becoming the presumptive nominee made an effective play for the left wing of the Democratic base by declaring his support for a forced withdrawal from Iraq, now seems, with the general election as his focus, to be making a laudable and pragmatic move toward the center, and is taking into account the genuine progress that has been made in Iraq in recent months. While he has not yet publicly reversed his position on a timed U.S. pullout, he is planning to visit Iraq soon, and I imagine that a man of his intelligence and subtlety of mind (how refreshing!) can be trusted not to let ideology trump wise counsel.

Read the rest of this entry »

Commenting on domestic politics has been such hard work lately — who’d have thought that people had such strong opinions? — that tonight we turn our attention to faraway Africa, where, they tell us, Zimbabwean pooh-bah Robert Mugabe has shown a rather mulish reluctance to abide by the results of recent elections. In a gracious gesture, however, he has now made it clear that he will gladly hand over the key to the executive washroom just as soon as a certain regional power, which has hitherto shown no interest whatsoever in the welfare of this bludgeoned nation, takes a more active role in the political process.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being rather worn out tonight, I shall refrain from posting another political screed; I also have a busy day at work tomorrow, and shall have no time for responding to the inevitable reactionary hagiographies of whatever Progressivist huckster I might have chosen to poniard. I do feel the need, however, to take a moment to explain once again that my political views, despite whatever some of you might think, are all over the map on an issue-by-issue basis, and that for every smug and patronizing trust-us-we-know-whats-good-for-you Wilsonian statist windbag on the Left, there is some folksy, Bible-thumping, creationist intellectual midget on the Right that bothers me every bit as much. Really, I can’t stand any of them.

So for tonight, something completely different: some very engaging reading — and plenty of it — from the prodigious Eliazar Yudkowsky. I won’t even categorize it; just go and have a look.

It is hard to imagine that anyone has had a more difficult spiritual path than Al Gore. The struggle against personality is central to all esoteric systems of inner work, and life has placed obstacles in his path at every turn: a privileged boyhood in a powerful political family, an Ivy League education, election to both the House and the Senate — followed by two terms as Vice President of the United States, and a photo finish for the White House. And if losing the Presidency to a fellow like George Bush caused him any doubts as to his own natural superiority, they were soon put to rest by his being awarded both an Oscar and the Nobel Prize (helped along, no doubt, by the effect of the Bush victory on the political climate in Hollywood and Stockholm). Small wonder, then, that he is such a smug, self-righteous windbag, as was recently in evidence in Chicago as he bestowed, with grandiloquent and orotund bombast, his coveted Endorsement upon Mr. Obama — a performance in which he apparently set aside environmental concerns for the moment, oblivious as he was to the enormous volumes of greenhouse gas he released in the process.

Anyway, the man really can’t help himself, I suppose, given the challenges he’s had to face; it’s fair to say that any of the rest of us, given similar circumstances, might have become overbearing prigs as well. So in the interest of giving the man a leg up, inner-development-wise, here’s a recently published item that might help him to take himself down a peg.

From reader JK comes a link to an article about a growing tension in the Persian Gulf. No, it isn’t between the Sunnis and the Shi’a, or between US diplomats and the Iraqi parliament, but between Islamic fundamentalists and those in the region who, having attracted enormous foreign investment, and having used it to build some of the most dynamic and opulent financial centers in the world, are also beginning to develop a taste for another Western export: freedom.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re back in Gotham after a splendid visit to San Francisco (and a long break from blogging). The cool and breezy weather was a delightful respite for a thermophobe like me, and each day the lovely Nina and I walked for miles, hammering in pitons as needed, and rappelling down the steeper blocks.

One of the highlights of the trip was a dinner in Berkeley on Saturday at Alice Waters’ celebrated restaurant Chez Panisse. I don’t often discuss food in these pages — in fact I can’t recall ever having done so before — but this was too remarkable a meal to pass over in silence.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re off duty for the next couple of days: the lovely Nina and I are enjoying a brief visit to San Francisco (look below the fold for a view of Nob Hill, with fog rolling in, as seen from the 12th floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel).

But I did want to take time out from our romantic interlude to join the chorus lamenting the startling death of Tim Russert, whose keen mind and extraordinary gifts will be missed by all. He was one of the greatest journalists, interviewers, and political analysts of my lifetime, and I am shocked by his untimely death.

Read the rest of this entry »

Off to the West Coast for a few days.

The nation of Indonesia is often cited as an exemplar of a “moderate” Islamic society (though of course it has had its share of Muslim extremism and terror). It is far from a being a tolerant, pluralistic society along Western lines, however; though one is “free” to worship, only five religions are on the list of government-approved options: Islam, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. (It is no surprise, of course, that Judaism is not on the menu.)

Read the rest of this entry »

It is far too hot to write, or even think cogently. New York’s infrastructure is collapsing under the strain: the power grid is failing, and subway service is becoming chaotic as outdoor sections of track begin to buckle in the heat. Broken-down vehicles are clogging the streets and highways, and after waiting to cross Madison Avenue at lunchtime today I noticed that I had actually left footprints in the asphalt. It even seemed at times this afternoon that some of the buildings themselves were sagging, but I might simply have been hallucinating as my vital organs shut down.

…what’s that you say? “How hot is it?”

It’s so hot that I saw a dog chasing a cat, and they were walking.

So for tonight, just a fascinating little news item about evolution at work in the laboratory: further confirmation for this greatest of all human insights, as if any were needed. Here.

It is hard to write at the moment; all of us here in Gotham have been reduced to shambling, gibbering zombies by recent meteorological events. Just a few days ago — though it might as well have been decades, so utterly has the recent catastrophe effaced any lucid memory of happier times — all seemed roughly normal, or at least as “normal” as life can ever be here in this enormous and hyperkinetic city, the crossroads of the world. But some time in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 7th, it all came to a sudden and startling end, as tragic and precipitous as a carload of promgoers swerving into a tree. The Hell-mouth is open.

Read the rest of this entry »

From my friend Jess Kaplan comes a little news item that doesn’t amount to much, really, in these tempestuous times, but which made a nice break from the customary media diet of catastrophe, vice, and woe. It’s about a little lost lighthouse.

Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t commented lately on the presidential race, but I’m certainly pleased that Mrs. Clinton, who gives me the shuddering fantods, appears finally to have been knocked out. Short of some gruesome work with an oaken stake and a wooden mallet we can’t be sure, however, and yesterday Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto, who has a clearheaded appreciation of what sort of politicians the Clintons really are, gave us his thoughts in his Best of the Web newsletter about what sort of calculations the former First Couple might be making as they retreat to their Westchester lair to lick their wounds and plot their next sally.

Read the rest of this entry »

In yesterday’s post we looked at the possibility of an impending “Singularity”, a convergence of various accelerating lines of progress in a number of technical and scientific fields that futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks will be an unparalleled historical disruption. When a sort of critical mass is reached, Kurzweil suggests, the result will be a colossal explosion of technology and artificial intelligence that will radically alter nearly every aspect of human existence.

Meanwhile, however, as reported in yesterday’s Times, fundamental physicists and cosmologists, far from readying the champagne, are confronting what might be called a “Kuhnian crisis“: recent observations of the universe at the largest scales have presented them with data for which no existing theoretical model can account.

Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s New York Times is yet another mention of a notion that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately: Ray Kurzweil’s idea of an impending technological “Singularity”.

The concept is simple enough: if we look at the history of the world, we see a consistently accelerating rate of progress — first biological, and then technological — which, if extrapolated into the future, predicts that something extraordinary is about to happen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we’re back. Our latest “Service Notice” post generated a reasonable question from reader Charles L., namely: why do I bother announcing that I won’t be posting? After all, it’s not as if the trains won’t be running, or the beer will stop flowing, and I realize it must seem a bit presumptuous to imagine that anyone would even care. But as I said to Charles, having established a pattern of daily blogging, I see missing a post as a lapse of discipline, and I suppose I feel obligated to own up to it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry - between work, travel, and social obligations, there’ll be nothing new here until Sunday or Monday, most likely. Apologies as always.

Sorry not to have posted anything yesterday; I spent many hours on the road, as well as selling several to my employer.

Today also my muse appears to be silent, as happens from time to time — so, looking ahead to resuming our musings on free will, I will simply offer a couple of provocative thoughts about causation and possibility, lifted from Daniel Dennett’s book Freedom Evolves. I’ll just plunk them on the page, for now; they will provide useful material for subsequent conversations, I think.

Read the rest of this entry »

With a hat tip to our friend Jess, here is a link to a post at the science blog Gene Expression that reports a result which, if true, is hardly a surprise.

After months of training and preparation, our friend Kevin Kim is now beginning his transcontinental walk, whose theme is interreligious dialogue. He’ll be starting his journey in British Columbia, and heading east. We can follow his progress at his website, Kevin’s Walk.

This should be interesting.

Good work by Horace Jeffery Hodges at his website, The Gypsy Scholar. See here, and here.

So caught up was I in holiday-weekend bacchanalia that I almost neglected to note that the Phoenix Mars Lander made a successful descent in the Red Planet’s north polar region yesterday.

“For the first time in 32 years, and only the third time in history, a JPL team has carried out a soft landing on Mars,” [NASA adminstrator Michael] Griffin said. “I couldn’t be happier to be here to witness this incredible achievement.”

There is water just beneath the surface in Mars’s polar areas, and this mission’s purpose is to have a look, with particular interest in the possibility of finding signs of biological activity. You can read the story here, and visit the mission website here.

We’ve had plenty of chat in in here lately about the political Left and Right, and what the words mean. I recently induced, with mischief aforethought, a conniption or two merely by mentioning that I was reading a book that argues (and persuasively, I might add) that Fascism was a phenomenon of the political Left; for many folks of my acquaintance the political markers “Left” and “Right” appear to be nothing more than synonyms for “good” and “evil”, respectively. There are many others, of course, for whom the polarity is reversed, but what never seems to be lacking is the polarization itself.

Here’s an online political quiz that locates you on the two-dimensional Nolan chart. It only takes a minute or so. Where do you stand? (Leaving aside the obvious disclaimers about boiling down such complexities to a one-minute quiz, I appear to be a “Left-leaning Libertarian.”)

A couple of days ago I linked to Steven Pinker’s discussion of the recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, and mentioned that one of the contributors, surprisingly given the overall makeup of the Council, was the irreligious and materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his essay, he is in fine, feisty form.

Read the rest of this entry »

Can anybody explain to me why there is such a flap about Hillary Clinton’s mention of the RFK assassination? It makes no sense to me whatsoever, even taking into consideration that taking offense is the new national pastime. I’m no fan of Mrs. Clinton, but this seems ridiculous.

Having posted some video clips of Kwong Sai Jook Lum Praying Mantis master Gin Foon Mark a couple of weeks ago, it seems only fair that I do the same for the system I’m involved with these days, Tang Fung Hung Ga. Here, then, is a video (forgive the odd camera angle) of our own Si-gung, master Frank Yee, demonstrating a medley of techniques, drills, and snippets of forms (the sequence opens with the beginning of our Five Animals Five Elements form). Above all, he is demonstrating the “internal power” that practitioners develop after many years of training.

Master Yee is the “real deal”; I think you’ll see what I mean.

Steven Pinker, writing in The New Republic, takes aim at The President’s Council on Bioethics for mulish opposition, on largely theological grounds, to a variety of promising medical and scientific efforts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, perhaps “nothing here until Friday at the soonest” was overly pessimistic; I’ll squeeze in one brief item. Following on our post about the pros and cons of conversing with one’s enemies, here is a relevant item from the opinion page of today’s Times, about JFK’s unwisdom in agreeing to the Vienna summit of 1961, a decision that arguably led to the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban missile crisis.

Due to a particularly grueling schedule Wednesday and Thursday, we’ll have nothing here, I’m afraid, until Friday at the soonest. I realize this has been happening more often of late, but there it is. At least there’s still no talk of a rate increase.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you know that the word of the week is “appeasement”. President Bush popped it up in an address to the Knesset, and Barack Obama, waving off his teammates, managed to get himself under it and make the catch. And now Pat Buchanan, who is clearly off his meds, is hollering imprecations from the bleachers.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago my old friend Carl Sturken, with whom I’ve been knocking about since fifth grade, called me up to ask if I felt like joining in a pickup band to play at a 35th reunion for the Princeton Day School class of 1973. (I’m not an official member of the class, really, because I only went to school there from 5th to 8th grade, but I knew it would be a hoot, as well as an interesting case study in the various ways that time can ravage the human form.) Carl had called at a propitious moment, because I had just taken up playing the drums again a month earlier, after a thirty-year layoff: I had left them behind in 1978 when I moved into a tiny apartment in the city upon being offered a job at the Power Station.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a hectic weekend, and there’s been no time for writing. Fortunately, our West Coast correspondent Jess Kaplan has sent along two items of interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ll most likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.

This will be of zero interest to any of you, but in my little corner of Gotham the corks are popping. Here’s why.

From our old friend Dave Pauley comes a link to some extraordinary photos of the Chaitén volcanic eruption in Chile. As Dave points out in his note to me, a local villager could understandably think there were more than “merely” natural forces at work here. Have a look.

If you haven’t heard, embattled Microsoft has now taken aim at Google Sky with its new application, the World Wide Telescope. Have a look here.

With a hat tip to our occasional commenter Addofio, here is the work of a most remarkable artist. Go have a look.

For those of you who don’t know, our friend Kevin Kim has a new website, created for the purpose of chronicling his upcoming transcontinental walk — a trek whose purpose is to explore the many parallel currents of religion in America, and if possible to help build bridges between them. The walk itself won’t get going for a few weeks yet, but you can’t keep a good blogger down, and Kevin has been posting as regularly as ever. Kevin himself is one of the more unusual religious figures I know: a trained theologian and an elder of the Presbyterian church, he’s also a non-theist.

Today he offers an interesting rumination on the Vatican’s position on Christianity for extraterrestrials; it’s well worth a look.

Read the rest of this entry »