waka waka waka

In the Op-Ed section of yesterday’s New York Times was an optimistic essay on the situation in Iraq by Michael O’Hanlon (of the Brookings Institution) and the well-known Mideast expert Kenneth Pollack (no relation to any of the waka waka waka staff). The article is getting a lot of play today from the government for its relatively upbeat assessment of the effects of the latest security effort. It begins as follows:

VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

Read the story here.

From my former PubSub colleague Mike Zaharee comes a delightful link: history’s greatest spacewalks.

We have learned today that Chief Justice John Roberts, while vacationing in Maine, was stricken by an “idiopathic” seizure, and taken to the hospital. This case is not without precedent, as apparently he suffered a similar episode some years ago, but at a robust 52, he seems the very picture of health. Or, to put it another way, that a man of such sound constitution should experience such an attack seems entirely, well, unwarranted.

You’d think he’d know his Fourth Amendment rights.

Should there be a bedrock principle, in international affairs, of unchallengeable sovereignty? Should the international community allow the rulers of nations to do whatsoever they wish within their own borders, without interference, and without exception? I think the answer is no. H. Jeffery Hodges takes up the question here.

A recent post on the cold-blooded murder of a Korean hostage by the Taliban drew a great deal of commentary. We’re on the road today, but having a free moment and online access, I thought I’d re-examine the original post in the light of some of the criticism it has received.

(more…)

We will be away from the waka waka waka command center from Friday afternoon until Sunday or Monday, with no guarantees of having either Internet access or anything worthwhile to say. We’ll be back in harness as soon as possible, but meanwhile please do browse our richly diverting archives, and be sure to visit the many excellent websites linked to in our sidebar.

Here’s a good idea: to harvest the restless energy of crowds of people. Two MIT graduate students have a plan to do just that.

The Taliban have now begun slaughtering their South Korean hostages, according to recent news reports.

Much has been made, not without good reason, of the monumental stupidity and arrogance of the hostages themselves. For these lunatics to imagine that their mission to convert fundamentalist Muslims to Christianity would accomplish anything other than to get themselves killed, or to create an excruciatingly unpleasant situation for their own government (it now looks as if they have succeeded at both), was staggeringly, unsurpassably idiotic. A troupe of voles might, with equal prospects of success, have visited a viper’s nest to lecture its residents on the rewards of being small, warm, and furry.

But for all that the Korean missionaries are imbeciles, they are gentle and harmless. The Taliban, on the other hand, are neither, and that they are willing to execute these helpless wretches — however unsurprisingly, considering their routine policies of brutal oppression and casual violence in the name of their execrable cult — places them, I think it is fair to say, outside the circle of humanity itself. May the civilized nations of the world spare no exertion to rout and extirpate these beasts.

I make no secret of my admiration for the philosopher Daniel Dennett. His intellectual interests coincide nearly exactly with my own: the puzzle of consciousness, the theory of evolution, the phenomenology of religion, and the question of human freedom in a world apparently ruled by a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws. He has tilled and seeded these fields for decades now, yielding a bountiful harvest of books, academic papers, lectures, and philosophical insights for the nourishment of interested laymen like me. One needn’t always agree with him — in particular, his “eliminativist” account of consciousness has many harsh critics — but agree or not, there is no denying the unusual fecundity of his intellect, and his remarkable ability to cut away the conceptual underbrush that often surrounds these persistent philosophical conundrums, and to bring what is unclear about the questions themselves sharply into focus.

(more…)

By way of my friend Eugene Jen comes a remarkable story: a civil servant with practically no brain. Have a look here.

I’ve heard of cases like this before. What I’m curious about — and I hope someone is going to look into this — is how the various functional parts are represented, how such a brain actually works. A study using a PET scan or fMRI would be most interesting, I would think.

I haven’t written about martial arts much lately, but I thought I’d like to give readers a glimpse of a kung-fu style they may not have heard about: Southern Praying Mantis.

Although I have devoted myself pretty much exclusively to Hung Gar for the past twenty-five years or so, the sifu I studied with when I began my kung-fu education back at the end of 1974, Master William Chung, had been trained in both Lam Sai Wing Hung Gar and Kwong Sai Jook Loom Praying Mantis. His Praying Mantis sifu was the famous Gin Foon Mark, and in addition to making sure that we had a solid foundation in the Hung system, Master Chung saw to it that we learned some Praying Mantis as well.

(more…)

As it happens, your humble correspondent was approached on the street by a Washington Post reporter yesterday, an affable young fellow who asked for an opinion about Wednesday’s events. I did offer a few observations, which found their way, with some looseness as to accuracy and context, into today’s edition.

(more…)

Recently blogger Dennis Mangan, the proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, offered his readers information suggesting that animal products in the diet are the cause of numerous health woes. It grieves me to offer more grist for his mill on this one, as I am a carnivore’s carnivore¹, but he might be interested in this, which accuses meat-eaters of causing global warming.

1. I’ve even considered attempting a diet that consists solely of animals that are themselves carnivores, just to get right up on the tippy-tippy top of the food chain.  

Well, after all the excitement in midtown yesterday, things are mostly back to normal, save for a few “frozen” blocks right around the site of the explosion (including, sadly, all of the places I usually go for lunch). We all know that one of these days we’re in for the real thing again, but this wasn’t it — and so we get right back to our routines, with just an occasional glance over our shoulders.

Life goes on, unless it doesn’t.

I can see why living in New York City isn’t for everyone, and today was a good example. If nothing else, the weather, as is so often the case around here this time of year, was awful. Gotham is currently straddling a stalled frontal boundary, and with customary perversity we are just on the warm side of it, so the air is thick with greasy moisture. It wasn’t as hot today as it often gets around here this time of year, as it managed only the middle eighties, but under these Amazonian atmospheric conditions that’s plenty: one is miserable even standing still, and copious sweating attends the slightest exertion.

(more…)

Here’s a stunning headline, from the Toronto Star:

Toronto’s Population Ages

What were they expecting?

In Peter Berkowitz’s response to Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great, he make some worthwhile points, but also trots out some familiar and flimsy ones as well. Let’s have a go at those first; we’ll take up his better arguments — and he does indeed make some — in a subsequent post.

(more…)

In today’s Wall Street Journal is an essay aimed at the advancing ranks of atheist authors. The names mentioned are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, but the brunt of the artillery is directed at Mr. Hitchens (who is evidently a friend of the author, Peter Berkowitz, a fellow of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution). It is a good response, and raises a number of worthwhile points. I expect that Christopher Hitchens can be counted on to respond, but I have a few comments to make as well, which I will offer shortly. Meanwhile, read the Berkowitz item here.

Given recent comments and emails, I should probably clarify my thoughts about religion’s place in the world. Though I have written rather disapprovingly on the topic lately, and although I do indeed think that religion is, and has been, an enormous retrograde influence on civilization’s progress (some lovely music and architecture notwithstanding), and an inexhaustible wellspring of sanguinary conflict and brutal repression, I have never argued, as some seem to think, for its forcible abolition. Not only would that be just as wrong, in just the same way, as the many dogmatic and bullying excesses that organized religion itself has been guilty of throughout its long and shameful history, but it would also, quite obviously, be utterly impossible to achieve. It’s an absurd idea, and I certainly didn’t mean to give the impression that it’s what I had in mind.

(more…)

It is a poorly kept secret that I am deeply skeptical of religious beliefs and institutions. The empirical question of whether their net effect is a boon or a blight upon our wretched species is, one could conceivably argue, still an open one, and I do acknowledge that religion provides a harmless existential anodyne for many people, one that it might indeed be cruel to deny them. But every glance at the news — not only the rivers of blood spilled each day over religious disputes worldwide, but also the cheap and tawdry spectacle of US politicians, their eyes glinting with ambition, elbowing one another out of the spotlight to bray about their “faith” — inclines me toward the view that civilization as a whole would be far, far, better off if we could somehow just be shut of the whole sodding mess once and for all.

A little while back the polymath Jonathan Miller presented on the BBC The Atheism Tapes, a series of interviews with some very intelligent and articulate unbelievers, along with, for balance, a prominent theologian. Like almost every other video clip in existence, these conversations have found their way to YouTube. Below is a list of the people Miller spoke with, and links to the interviews.

(more…)

With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here is a wonderful example of the power of punctuation to alter the meaning of written English.

On Sunday, the New York Times published a long editorial, The Road Home, declaring the US effort in Iraq an utter failure, and insisting that we withdraw forthwith. Many agree. Of course, many of those who agree do so more from a visceral loathing of this administration and distrust of government in general, an inchoate pacifism and aversion to military action of any sort, or a view of the US as a swaggering bully with no moral standing, than from a sophisticated and scholarly understanding of the labyrinthine historical, political, diplomatic, cultural, religious, strategic and tactical complexities of this extraordinarily difficult engagement. But, that said, complementary prejudices animate many of those on the other side, and there are certainly many sophisticated observers who do indeed share, in whole or in part, the pessimistic position taken by the Times.

The opposing viewpoint is expressed with succinctness and clarity by Victor Davis Hanson, who responds to the Times editorial, point by point, here.

Regardless of your opinion as to whether the action in Iraq was justified in the first place (I am of the opinion, along with Tom Friedman and others, that it was, but that the postwar management was catastrophically bungled), this is an agonizing and crucial debate; we stand now at a major historical crossroads. Whatever your current view of the way forward — and reasonable people may differ — Hanson’s essay is worthwhile reading.

Those of you with an interest in astronomy, and a fondness for order, might like to take a look here.

In a post a while back I explained why I don’t own an iPod or similar such gadget, the main reason being that I don’t enjoy the acoustic isolation they impose. Well, it turns out that there’s another reason you might want to doff those ear goggles from time to time; learn more here.

We seem to have been delivered, however briefly, from the suffocating heat and humidity that have tormented us for the past few days. During the afternoon a robust frontal boundary made its way Gothamward across the Keystone and Garden States, and at about 5:30 or so the sky turned as black as an old bruise, the heavens burst asunder, and a cataract of rain pelted the sizzling sidewalks with such force that it bounced knee-high. I’m sure that in our northern suburbs, and other places where trees can live, many were blown down — and doubtless there are those in such leafy districts who are without electrical power as a result — but here in the city the relief is palpable, and I am sure I speak for many others when I say that after another day or two of the weather we’ve just had, Death himself, in any but his most appalling forms, would have been greeted warmly at the door.

I’ve spent thirty summers in New York City, and know beyond hope that this is just the fleetingest lull, a moment’s ease whose purpose is only to enhance the effect when Torquemada seizes his instruments once again. But hey, we’ll take it.

I’m not quite myself tonight. Not only has the ghastly heat and fetor here in Gotham reduced me to a gibbering wretch, but at the end of the day I visited my periodontist, Dr. Louis Franzetti, who implanted two small screws in my upper jaw, as part of an ongoing cakehole-reconstruction project roughly on the scale of Boston’s Big Dig. Dr. Franzetti is a man of Christlike mercy and incomparable skill, but in the dolorous aftermath of such a skull-piercing I have decided to forgo mental acuity in favor of the palliative blessings of organic chemistry. So no post tonight.

I wouldn’t want you to leave empty-handed, though! So here is a little video clip I’m sure you will enjoy, with a hat tip to Dr. F. himself.

The other day, my mind restless with the somber news of the world, and its echoes of familiar themes, I took from the shelf The Gathering Storm, the first book of Winston Churchill’s incomparable six-volume History of the Second World War. I say “incomparable” because there is really nothing else like it in all of historical literature: an account of the greatest armed conflict of all time, written by a man who was not only one of the foremost masters of the English language ever to lift a pen, but who was also the man who led, by his command of the spoken word, his enormous military expertise, and the sheer power of his personality, the armies of freedom to their ultimate triumph.

(more…)

I’m a peaceable fellow, but it was not without a wee quickening of my Scottish heart that I read (with a tip of the tam o’shanter to Dennis Mangan and his commenters) of the reception given a couple of jihadists recently up in Glasgow.

(more…)

More stern stuff from Hitchens on the British terror plot, here.

Alright, so much for “Back in Black”. Thanks to those who contacted me to tell me how much they disliked that new theme; I’ll find something else.

I was tired of the old look. What do you think?

[Note: I had experimented with another visual theme, but nobody liked it, and I soon reverted. So this post might make little sense now.]

I don’t comment over at Bill Vallicella’s website any more, but I still follow the conversations there, as they are often interesting, and attract a number of intelligent participants.

Bill has put up an odd post today, however, which he calls The Humanity Delusion, in an obvious swipe at Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto The God Delusion.

(more…)

Well, after such a plangent cri de coeur, it’s time to lighten up a little; one thing I always find amusing is to have a look at the search keyphrases that have brought folks here. Here’s a sampling of the current year’s crop:

(more…)

I am going to have to stop reading the news one of these days, I think. What it brings me, day in and day out, is a bitter harvest of suffering and misery, gathered from all the world over, and it is getting to be more than I can bear.

(more…)

I recently promised readers a glimpse into my latest literary purchase — a 1936 publication called The World’s Best Jokes — and here it is. (We are on holiday at the moment, and I am simply too worn out from lying on the beach in the warm July sun, and from consuming draft beer and broiled lobsters, to tackle any weightier issues tonight.)

(more…)

The Washington Post offers us an interesting and disturbing glimpse into the private life of President Bush; it is an odd life of isolation, and, one has to imagine, a kind of desperation as well. From the article:

After reading Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” Bush brought in the author and a dozen other scholars to talk about the lessons. “What can I learn from history?” Bush asked Roberts, according to [Irwin M.] Stelzer, the Hudson Institute scholar, who participated…

…Much of the discussion focused on the nature of good and evil, a perennial theme for Bush, who casts the struggle against Islamic extremists in black-and-white terms. Michael Novak, a theologian who participated, said it was clear that Bush weathers his difficulties because he sees himself as doing the Lord’s work.

Reassuring, no? Read the story here, and then look here to see why Lynne Olson, the author of a recent book about Winston Churchill, thinks that Dubya, who idolizes Churchill, actually has more in common with Neville Chamberlain than Sir Winston.

We’re spending a few days at our seaside retreat in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on the outer extremity of Cape Cod, and today found the memsahib and me poking around at a local flea market. I’m always on the lookout for odd books, and after I had already, with reluctance, been talked by my better half out of spending $14 on a well-kept copy of a lavishly illustrated tome from 1898 entitled Our New Possessions — about the then-recent US acquisition of the Phillipines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii — I slyly dropped a fin for a slim volume called The World’s Best Jokes, by one Lewis Copeland, copyright 1936. I always enjoy antique joke-books, and this looks like a real corker.

(more…)