waka waka waka

The conservative commentator and New York Times columnist David Brooks offers us a remembrance of his mentor, the great William F. Buckley.

Here.

An article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal examines a bill introduced by Barack Obama that would offer tax incentives to “patriotic” corporations.

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If you’re wondering what you’re missing at TED 2008, have a look at this on-the-spot blog. If this isn’t the place to be for these few days, I don’t know what is.

Today was the beginning of the annual TED conference, which has become just about the toughest ticket in the world to get hold of. Held in Monterey, California, it’s a gathering of 1,000 of the “edgiest” members of the tech, entertainment, and design communities, and frankly, it sounds like a blast. Each speaker is given 18 minutes to present something amazing, and at its best, it’s a glimpse of the future.

You can learn more about the conference, and see some videos of past presentations, at the TED website, here. You can also find lots of TED-talk videos on YouTube.

Another sad note: from my friend Pat Goldsmith I have just learned that drummer Buddy Miles, best known for his playing in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies, has died.

From my lovely wife Nina comes a link to a restaurant that gives new meaning to the phrase “haute cuisine”. I don’t know how the food is, but you certainly get the atmosphere.

Have a look here.

I’ve just learned that William F. Buckley has died. Story here.

Continuing our recent focus on the decline of freedom in Russia, we see in today’s Wall Street Journal that Lev Ponomarev, an outspoken critic of the Russian penal system, has been charged with criminal libel:

On Friday, Mr. Ponomarev, a former aide to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and a colleague of opposition leader Garry Kasparov, was charged with criminally “slandering” General Yuri Kalinin, who runs Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Mr. Ponomarev has been calling attention to the often brutish treatment of prisoners in Russia’s roughly 700 penal colonies, some 50 of which have acquired reputations as “torture colonies.” He now is required to get government permission to leave Moscow. If convicted, he could face up to three years in a penal colony.

Story here.

I’ve been watching a spate of videos, over the past week or so, featuring various members of the group often referred to as the “New Atheists”: Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. The last two links I’ve posted here were debates between one or another of these fellows with some religiously-minded opponent, but most recently I ran across a conversation amongst all four of them at once. This video ought to be an instant hit with all the atheists out there: these fellows have achieved rock-star status amongst the heathens, and getting them all together like this constitutes sort of a Supergroup of the Damned. (Too bad the name “Blind Faith” is already taken.)

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In recent posts, inspired by a New York Times article and helped along by our well-informed friend Jess Kaplan, we’ve looked at Putin’s tightening grip on Russia. His power-grab has hardly confined itself to increasing restrictions on democracy, but has also, and arguably more dangerously for global stability and security, involved ruthless appropriation of major private industries, and use of this command of the energy sector as a bludgeon against his neighbors. This is mighty important stuff, but nobody seems to pay much attention. Why?

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Yesterday we passed along a New York Times story about the deepening autocracy of the Putin regime, and our old friend Jess Kaplan commented insightfully. Today he has sent us a valuable article on the subject: The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin’s Crackdown Holds Russia Back, by the Stanford scholars Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss.

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Here’s something useful, just sent to me by the lovely Mrs. Pollack: a website that lists hundreds of companies, with instructions on how to navigate through their automated telephone menus to get through to a real live human being. (How to get through to an intelligent human being, or one that cares whether you live or die, is presumably still under investigation.)

Here.

New research has determined that the Earth, barring any manipulation of its orbit on our part, will be consumed by the dying Sun in 7.6 billion years.

Experts are divided on whether this will allow sufficient time for the completion of the proposed Second Avenue subway line.

Learn more here.

We note that the aging, self-centered gadfly Ralph Nader has announced his intention to screw up yet another presidential election.

One has to wonder what he could possibly be thinking. Does he figure that at almost 74 years old he is a more attractive candidate than he was in 2000, when he got a paltry 2.7% of the vote — just enough to put George Bush in the White House — or in 2004, when he managed only 0.38%? Does he reckon that what it will take to snap the legions of breathless young Obama congregants out of their ecstatic thralldom is to offer them one last chance to be led by a cantankerous old grouch?

Face facts, Ralph: at this point in your career, you make Dennis Kucinich look unstoppable. Go write a book or something.

On the front page of today’s New York Times is a chilling account of just how bad things have got in Russia under the rapidly coalescing dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.

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I yesterday’s post I linked to a video of a debate between Conservative Rabbi David Wolpe and atheist author Sam Harris, and said that it looked to be of a very different quality than the wincingly lopsided encounter between Christopher Hitchens and Shmuley Boteach. Well, now I’ve had a chance to watch the whole thing, and indeed it was on quite another level. David Wolpe is highly intelligent, educated, articulate, and charming — in short, everything that Boteach manifestly is not — and his conversation with Harris was as civil as it was engrossing. I recommend it to you all, and may comment on it myself shortly. You can find it here.

I’ve now had a chance to watch the Hitchens-Boteach debate, and it wasn’t pretty. I don’t know who thought these two might be evenly matched, but it was a sad spectacle. I was reminded of H.L. Mencken’s description of the doomed William Jennings Bryan’s spasms of desperation at the Scopes trial (the comparison is apt, as Boteach also spent much of his time railing, incoherently and with astounding ignorance, against evolution):

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With many thanks to our friend Maven, here is the full video of the debate I was unable to attend, back on January 30th, between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the question Does God Really Exist?

I haven’t had time to watch it myself yet, but I thought I’d pass it along without further comment. Let’s have a look.

After exhausting the subject in the comment thread of yesterday’s post, I’m not about to comment on the admittedly remote possibility of there being any whiff of political bias in the front-page, above-the-fold “human-interest story” about John McCain in today’s Times. (We’ll leave that to every other blogger and pundit west of the Azores.)

So instead, here’s a cute little robot.

With a hat tip to James Taranto, here’s a story you didn’t see in the New York Times: Bob Geldof, the noted social activist, former Boomtown Rat, and star of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb video, praised George Bush for his commitment to fighting disease and poverty in Africa.

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Not surprisingly, Christopher Hitchens has weighed in with an article on the Rowan Williams dustup. I missed it when it came out on the 11th, but ran across it today.

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In a recent post we linked to a paper by William Lycan that argues that both dualist and materialist mind-body philosophies are equally unsupported by evidence. As I mentioned, this is surely heartening to Cartesians, who must weary of having their views dismissed as so much nonsense. But is it right to conclude from Lycan’s paper — as his dualist readers are likely to do — that one might as well plump for dualism as materialism? Not so fast. Lycan doesn’t think so, and neither do I.

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Not having finished a couple of longer posts I am gestating, for this evening I can only offer lighter fare: everything you ever wanted to know about lockgrooves.

You, alive: a most unusual state of affairs. As far as we know, it happens only once in the whole lifetime of the Universe. Make the most of it.

Sorry to have been off the air yesterday; a busy afternoon led to an evening at the theater (we saw a spellbinding production of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). By the time we got home a post was simply not in the cards.

I shall have to make a similar apology for today as well: I was up at the crack of dawn to spend the entire day traipsing around Chinatown as part of the annual Yee’s Hung Ga Kung Fu Association lion dance and parade. These Lunar New Year extravaganzas are always exhausting — I’ve been doing it for 32 years now, and it doesn’t get any easier as the knees and back get older — so once again I’m too pooped to post. I have more to say about Lycan’s paper, but it will have to wait.

In a recent post Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, called our attention to a 2006 paper entitled Giving Dualism Its Due, in which philosopher William Lycan acknowledges that there is really no compelling evidence either for or against mind-body dualism.

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It is fashionable in some circles to regard Mankind as nothing more than a global despoiler, a pernicious infestation that the poor Planet would be far better off without. For those who feel themselves drawn toward this curious normative vortex, there is now an organization dedicated to the gradual and permanent eradication, by attrition, of the entire human race. Apparently we’ll like the place much better when we’re not around.

Have a look here.

Our friend Charles, proprietor of the website Liminality, shares with us his reaction to the deliberate destruction by fire of South Korea’s “Number One Treasure”, the ancient wooden gate known as Namdaemun.

I was reminded of our own shock and horror here in Gotham at the obliteration of the Twin Towers, although of course the two events are obviously quite different in important ways, first and foremost being that nobody was killed in the arson attack on Seoul’s historic landmark. But Charles’s post conveys the same sickening sense of the seemingly solid ground moving under one’s feet, of being confronted with the awful fact that all of our attachments are in vain.

Don’t trade in that gas-guzzling Detroit road boat just yet. The Cassini space probe, which has been buzzing about the Saturn system gathering data, has revealed that the giant moon Titan has hundreds of times more combustible hydrocarbons just lying around on its surface than are in all the known oil and gas reserves on Earth.

Could get mighty interesting, as well as being bad news for Hugo Chávez and the House of Saud. Learn more here.

In today’s London Times we read the following:

The acting director of a Baghdad psychiatric hospital has been arrested on suspicion of supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq with the mentally impaired women that it used to blow up two crowded animal markets in the city on February 1, killing about 100 people.

Iraqi security forces and US soldiers arrested the man at al-Rashad hospital in east Baghdad on Sunday. They then spent three hours searching his office and removing records. Sources told The Times that the two women bombers had been treated at the hospital in the past.

“They [the security forces] arrested the acting director, accusing him of working with al-Qaeda and recruiting mentally ill women and using them in suicide bombing operations,” a hospital official said.

Ibrahim Muhammad Agel, director of the hospital, was killed in the Mansour district of Baghdad on December 11 by gunmen on motorbikes. Colleagues suspect that he was shot for refusing to cooperate with al-Qaeda. Even before Sunday’s arrest, US officials believed that al-Qaeda was scouring Iraq’s hospitals for mentally impaired patients whom it could dupe into acting as suicide bombers. They said that al-Qaeda had used the mentally impaired as unwitting bombers before. “We have fairly good reason to believe this is not the first time they have recruited mentally handicapped individuals,” said one senior officer, though he did not think there had been more than half a dozen cases.

That the responsible parties can imagine such acts to be morally justified, as I am sure they do, and can believe themselves to be righteous servants of God, should give us plenty to think about.

No post this evening; the lovely Nina and I are off to see The Seafarer.

Back in harness tomorrow, or as time permits.

There has been a good deal of excitement lately about global warming, as readers may already have noticed. It having been announced that the cause is an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to human activity, various segments of society have whipped themselves into rather a frenzy, and some of those in the public eye have made noble and ostentatious gestures of self-sacrifice — even going so far as to arrive at televised awards shows in Toyota Priuses, and to retrofit their palaces with compact fluorescent bulbs.

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There’s been quite a ruction lately about comments made by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that called for Britain to adopt Islamic Sharia law as part of its legal system. This sort of supine acquiescence is the road to cultural suicide, it seems to me, and he has been roundly castigated by all, as he ought.

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Well, your humble correspondent had an album up for a Grammy this time around: Borrowed Time (Tiempo Prestado), by guitarist Steve Khan, which was nominated in the Best Latin Jazz Album category — but the award went to another outstanding artist, Paquito D’Rivera.

Sorry Steve! We’ll get ‘em next time.

Putting aside the pressing issues of the day for a moment, it’s time for a personal item. My 19-year-old son Nick, having taken up the guitar about three years ago at the urging of his old dad, has been writing music like mad. He spends most of his time playing his Dean Evo, but has just sent me a clip of himself playing a little Celtic-style ditty that he wrote a little while back on the 6-string acoustic. (Think Bron-Y-Aur Stomp.)

Yesterday I offered readers a link to a video of a thought-provoking conversation (transcript here, video here) between J. Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins (if you haven’t found the time to look at it yet, I do hope you will). In the ensuing thread, however, rather than discussing any of the forward-looking topics that had come up, our commenters focused exclusively on the various ways that people found Dawkins annoying or disappointing, and I piled on as well.

Yes, he can be a bit of a pill. But in that video, I saw something that shouldn’t go unremarked.

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Thanks to Kevin Kim for bringing to our attention the World’s Stupidest Comment Thread. It includes such gems as:

When politicians say they are for Change but never explain what the change is we better all be careful. I think Adolf Hitler was elected in Germany on a platform of “Change”.

and

A lot of people have pointed out that Mr. Obama is a practicing muslim, but the thing that a lot of folks have yet to recognize is: sources have told me that Barack Obama is actually a Nazi. I have yet to confirm this, but his comments about terror, Mitt Romney and others seem to lean that direction. Am I saying that he wants to burn the entire Jewish race? I haven’t seen any comment from him on that topic, one way or the other. But his stance of pro muslim, pro terror and anti israel politics seems to indicate as such.

Here it is.

*Update: if you’re just reading this for the first time, you’re too late. The whole comment thread has been taken down, I’m sad to say. -MP

Here’s Richard Dawkins, opening a conversation with J. Craig Venter at a recent conference in Germany:

I thought I’d begin by reading a quotation from a famous philosopher and historian of science from the 1930s, Charles Singer, to give an idea of exactly how much things have changed. And Craig Venter is a leader, perhaps the leader, in making that change today. So, this is a quote from 1930, Charles Singer:

“Despite interpretations to the contrary, the theory of the gene is not a mechanist theory. The gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or, for that matter, the organism itself. If I ask for a living chromosome, that is, for the only effective kind of chromosome, no one can give it to me, except in its living surroundings, any more than he can give me a living arm or leg. The doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body. They exist and function only in relation to other organs. Thus, the last of the biological theories leaves us where the first started in the presence of a power called life, or Psyche, which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions.”

You couldn’t ask for a more comprehensive destruction of a conventional view than that. That is not just wrong. It is catastrophically, utterly, stupefyingly wrong. It’s wrong in an interesting way, and Craig is the best person to tell us what’s wrong with all that.

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Much was made of a National Intelligence Assessment last year that suggested that Iran was not the nuclear threat it had been cracked up to be. In today’s Washington Sun, however, we read:

The director of national intelligence is backing away from his agency’s assessment late last year that Iran had halted its nuclear program, saying he wishes he had written the unclassified version of the document in a different manner.

Intelligence director Mike McConnell told a senate hearing yesterday that if he had had more time to write the document, he “probably would change a few things”.

“Declared uranium enrichment efforts, which will enable the production of fissile material, continue. This is the most difficult challenge in nuclear production. Iran’s efforts to perfect ballistic missiles that can reach North Africa and Europe also continue.”

He went on, “We remain concerned about Iran’s intentions and assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”

In other words, let’s not be too complacent. Learn more here.

Following on yesterday’s post, here’s a story about another gruesome malady: it turns out that meat-processing workers in Minnesota are developing a strange neurological illness as a result of being splattered with atomized hog brains.

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My son Nick asked me yesterday if I had ever heard of something called Morgellons disease. I hadn’t, so I looked it up online. It is, as they say in England, a rum business indeed.

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What a game! As a New Yorker, I do hope I will be forgiven a moment of undignified exuberance.

Woo-hoo!

I note that once again, thanks to the visual acuity of a unusually long-lived rodent from the Keystone State, we may now expect a prolonged interval of wintry weather. While this bothers me not at all — I am far better constituted for cold weather than hot, and I dread, each year, the arrival of Gotham’s summer swelter — I know there are many for whom this is depressing news. There is a simple and obvious solution, of course, but for some reason this annual inconvenience persists.

About forty years ago I read a science-fiction book called Wasp. I remember it only dimly, but as I recall it was a corking good read, and the central metaphor of the book has stayed with me: that a small insect, buzzing around the inside of an automobile, can so distract the driver as to cause an accident. A tiny animal weighing less than a gram can cause the destruction of an enormously massive machine and the deaths of its vastly more powerful occupants.

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Here, from India, is an engaging example of spontaneous self-organization:

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