I see that Zacarias Moussaoui has been sentenced to life in prison, which I think is the correct decision. I am generally opposed to the death penalty anyway, and in the case of a fundamentalist Muslim fanatic eager for his chance at martyrdom, a death sentence is effectively the same as throwing Br’er Rabbit into the briar patch. Under this arrangement he will have to wait a very long time for his 72 virgins.
In today’s Wall Street Journal is an appreciation, by Fouad Ajami, of the great historian and scholar of Islam Bernard Lewis. Read it here, and then, by reading Lewis himself, gain a better understanding of the cultural and historical underpinnings of the current “clash of civilizations”, which is, of course, but the latest convulsion in a grim struggle that has lasted over 1400 years.
Lewis on the prospects for Western civilization:
It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered.
-from “Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery”
April 28, 2006 – 10:44 pm
Your correspondent finds himself tonight in Maumee, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo. The area code here is 419, so it seems fitting to post a link that has to do with the “Nigerian Scam”, also known as the “419 scam” (because that is the number of the Nigerian law that the racket violates). This is the familiar email con in which someone in Africa claims to have a king’s ransom that needs depositing Stateside, and that the plan lacks only a trustworthy party (the intended scamee) to provide a safe place for the swag, in return for a hefty cut.
Jess Kaplan has brought to my attention a fellow who calls himself Ebola Monkey Man, whose hobby is scamming the scammers. He pretends to bite, then plays the would-be swindler like a tarpon. He posts the email exchanges on his website; in particular Jess had pointed out this episode. Meet Black Mic – Bitch Honkey Killa and B-Smooth.
From my old friend P.M. “Nick” Nicholes, who lives with his family in magnificent isolation in Lennep, Montana (pop. about 8) along the Musselshell River, near the Crazy Mountains, comes word of a brand-new way to test oneself in both brain and brawn: chessboxing.
April 17, 2006 – 11:04 pm
Today, having been summoned for jury duty, I spent a few hours as a cog in the machinery of American justice. Admittedly, a case could be made that my contribution was actually quite minor: I showed up at 8:45 a.m. at the Supreme Court building at 360 Adams Street in downtown Brooklyn; sat in a large room, reading, until lunchtime; took a very enjoyable stroll (accompanied by an equally enjoyable sandwich) down to the lovely Brooklyn Promenade overlooking New York Harbor, where I dined al fresco in the delightful spring sunshine; returned to the Central Jury room at 2; sat there reading until the end of the day, at which point I was discharged. Still, despite the fact that my name was not called even once other than to send me packing, I exited the building with that special glow of inner satisfaction that only those who, like me, have sacrificed in the service of their country can really understand. Not pride, mind you, but just the knowledge that one has done one’s Duty, and done it well.
I know today’s post was supposed to follow on the previous item about C.S. Lewis, but in this morning’s email was a very interesting note from my friend Gus Spathis.
Having got up and off to work earlier than usual today, gone off to Don Alias’s funeral (a sad affair) up in Harlem at midday, strained my brain for hours afterward writing code, then spent the evening at the kwoon, I’m just too tired to write much tonight. So I will just pass along an interesting item from the New York Times’s website (with a tip of the hat to Eugene): The Gospel of Judas, a manuscript dating back to the fourth century A.D. or so, has just been translated. One of the “Gnostic Gospels“, it paints Judas in a more favorable light; in fact it depicts him as Jesus’s most valuable ally, as the one who made his sacrifice possible. Read more here.
February 8, 2006 – 11:56 pm
Tonight, it being quite late (and I must rise far too early in the morning tomorrow), rather than attempting to whip up anything worthwhile of my own I will poach an interesting piece from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. It points out that, contrary to the impression most people have of the strictures of Islam, there is in fact in Islamic doctrine no absolute prohibition of depictions of Mohammed. Apparently this was simply a custom that was adopted as a result of Jewish and Christian influences in Islam’s earlier days. To buttress his point the author, the well-known writer and editor Amir Taheri cites many examples of paintings of the Prophet, including this:
February 6, 2006 – 11:54 pm
Once again we are treated to an incendiary example of Muslim outrage. I refer, of course, to the “Danish Cartoon Riots” that have dominated world news for a few days now. The leaders of nations such as Iran and Syria are no doubt happily fanning the flames; nothing serves an autocratic leader so well as an angry mob and an external enemy. The reaction of the “blogosphere” has been predictable; everyone quite fairly points out that Muslims apparently can dish it out, but can’t take it. References to Jews as snakes, pigs and apes in the Muslim press go unremarked, Western culture is denounced as the work of Satan, and nobody seems to mind. And far, far worse, of course, the deliberate slaughter of civilians is not merely tolerated but applauded. The world would like very much to see some resistance to this extremism coming from within the Muslim community itself, but it is awfully hard to find. I’ve seen one example, though – a website called sorrynorwaydenmark.com, which consists of a page of text and a guestbook. The statement begins:
In the middle of all the mayhem surrounding the Danish cartoons controversy, a group of Arab and Muslim youth have set up this website to express their honest opinion, as a small attempt to show the world that the images shown of Arab and Muslim anger around the world are not representative of the opinions of all Arabs. We whole-heartedly apologize to the people of Denmark, Norway and all the European Union over the actions of a few, and we completely condemn all forms of vandalism and incitement to violence that the Arab and Muslim world have witnessed. We hope that this sad episode will not tarnish the great friendship that our peoples have fostered over decades.
It is an admirable gesture, and I admire their bravery, for without doubt they have acquaintances, if not friends, who will see their offering as treasonous to Islam, and as we know, such people are often not averse to murder.
February 5, 2006 – 11:33 pm
Have you heard anything about this? Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP, made a speech at Fayettville State University in North Carolina on February 1st in which he made hate-filled and racist remarks the likes of which would have got a white conservative politician in very hot water indeed.
Mr. Bond, speaking at the beginning of Black History Month, said, among other things, that our last two Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, were “tokens”, and that “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side”.
February 2, 2006 – 12:56 pm
Today, February 2nd, is Groundhog Day. As usual, the world waited atip for Punxsutawney Phil’s climatic prognosis. According to legend, as I am sure most of you know, when the hirsute haruspex sees his shadow, we are in for six more weeks of winter. And as so often happens, this morning the news was bad once again, and the blameless denizens of the world’s temperate zones were condemned to prolonged and unnecessary suffering. All because of a bloody groundhog.
But there is a simple solution, based on an elementary utilitarianist calculation, that seems to have been overlooked by all. Take the overweening little rodent by the scruff of the neck and scoop out his beady little eyeballs with an oyster knife. From that day forward, Ol’ Blind Phil might be as umbrageous as the spreading pall of Vesuvius, but seehis shadow? I don’t think so.
No need to thank me. Just doing my job.
February 1, 2006 – 12:52 am
My good friend Jess Kaplan has just sent me a link to a transcript of a 1985 lecture by the late Julian Jaynes. I’ve been meaning for a while to mention his bookThe Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and now seems as good a time as any.
I first came upon this book many years ago, in early days of my own interest in the question of consciousness, and was drawn in by its lengthy and mysterious-sounding title. I thought it would be a summary of mainstream research, but it it turned out to be quite the opposite. It is, instead, a detailed and closely-argued brief for a radical theory of human history and development.
Jaynes, who died in 1997 at the age of 77, was a professor of psychology at Princeton University. But he is best remembered now for his claim, fantastic at first hearing, that our consciousness – the ordinary self-awareness that we are accustomed to – is in fact a very recent acquisition, and that within historical times humans were quite unconscious.
January 28, 2006 – 6:22 pm
Tonight is the beginning of the Year of the Dog, lunar year 4703. It is called “bingxu” in the “Stem-Branch” system, which repeats a name every 60 years.
Congratulations, and may you prosper.
January 27, 2006 – 11:52 pm
Having written a post earlier about James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces, I probably should remark on the recent brouhaha, which you would have had to have been in a persistent vegetative state not to have noticed.
It turns out that Mr. Frey’s story of his recovery from multiple addictions was perhaps as much fiction as fact. Among other things, he wrote of jail time that he never in fact served. He fabricated an excruciatingly convincing account of undergoing multiple root-canal procedures without anaesthesia. He concocted a tragic backstory about being responsible for an adolescent girlfriend’s death. In other words, he made a lot of stuff up and passed it off as the truth. A lot of people are pretty upset, not least of whom is his principal benefactor, the towering Oprah Winfrey, who dressed him down before the Entire World yesterday.
January 21, 2006 – 4:20 pm
I’m fond of books. I tend to accumulate them, and at this point have between one and two thousand of them on shelves, in piles on the floor, and scattered about. But I do have to admit that they are bulky and old-fashioned. In a conversation yesterday with PubSub CEO Gus Spathis, he referred to an attachment to physical books as “quaint nostalgia”. There are few technologies – and let’s acknowledge that the printed word is a technological artifact – that have survived so long essentially unchanged. Books are large, they are heavy, and they are made at considerable cost from wood and cotton and soot. The information represented by a book is, by Information Age standards, completely sessile, and the hard drive of my laptop, which is smaller than almost any book, could easily hold the contents of even the most avid collector’s personal library.
January 15, 2006 – 9:14 pm
One of the things that people like to do is “boil down” the staggering complexity of the world into comprehensive rules and principles. Surprisingly, the world itself often cooperates by revealing itself to be, in fact, a rather orderly place that does indeed seem to behave according to laws that are simple enough for us to ferret out.
Some of the rules we have worked out are abstruse, detailed and complicated, yet have held up well under critical examination – quantum mechanics and general relativity come to mind – while others are vague generalities like “there’s a sucker born every minute” and “faint heart ne’er won fair lady”. Some are obviously wrong, like “a watched pot never boils”.
Sometimes we pick one thing and make it the central orgainizing principle of the world. My friend Bob Wyman, for example, has worked out a plausible system of ethics entirely based upon the idea of resisting entropy. Another friend, songwriter Larry Mcnally has written that “Love is everything – everything else is nothing.” He’s not the first to take that stance, but it’s a good song.
Well, I’m not immune to this temptation either, and sometimes I think that the fundamental currency in human affairs – the fungible coin in which the business of mankind is transacted – is attention.
January 14, 2006 – 6:17 pm
Today the Washington Redskins are visiting the Seattle Seahawks for an NFL playoff game. The contest has been attended with the usual hype, but the sportswriters covering the game for the Seattle Times have faced a peculiar challenge – the paper has decided not to allow them to use the name “Redskins” more than once in their stories. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the only other obvious token by which to refer to the team is the name of their hometown, Washington, which happens also to be the the home state of the home team.
January 2, 2006 – 11:55 pm
It suddenly dawned on me this evening that I had not yet written a post formally introducing my readers to The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The world first learned of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s role in the creation of all that is when one Bobby Henderson, a “concerned citizen”, wrote an open letter to the Kansas School Board in which he explained that humans received the spark of life from His Noodly Appendage, and described the teachings of Spaghetti Monsterism. Mr. Henderson quite reasonably requests that the Pastafarian account of the origin of life be taught along with Intelligent Design and Darwinism:
One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.
December 28, 2005 – 12:24 am
Educational and psychological theories of the mid-20th century saw the human brain as an infinitely flexible learning machine, with no “factory presets”. But the picture that is now emerging of our mental apparatus is of a suite of prewired cognitive modules, located in various areas of the brain, each of which has been shaped by natural selection for some useful task. These modules provide us with a common a priori framework for organizing our model of the world, and each module contributes an intuitive description of some aspect of our environment.
December 24, 2005 – 4:02 pm
There are many in the scientific community – some of its most prominent spokespersons – who seem to have embraced a rather militant form of atheism. Richard Dawkins seems to be the most visible, but there are many others.
I used to be a strongly committed atheist myself, but my viewpoint has softened, and I would categorize myself now as a curious agnostic. One of the reasons that I abandoned the atheist position is the simple fact that reason itself is silent on the question of God’s existence. Efforts have been made to put faith in God onto a solid naturalist or philosophical foundation, but the fact remains that there is still no way to compel either belief in or denial of the existence of God.
December 20, 2005 – 10:12 pm
The campaign by Biblical literalists to have their mythology masquerade as science in the public schools has been dealt another setback. In a welcome and much-needed decision, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones has struck down the Dover Township, PA school board’s attempt to smuggle “Intelligent Design” into the biology curriculum.
You can read the judge’s opinion here.
December 19, 2005 – 11:05 pm
I expect that most of you have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but you may not have seen the preface that he wrote for a Ukrainian edition. The preface was censored in England, and was not added to most English translations. I certainly hadn’t seen it before my friend Duncan Werner sent me a link to it today.
December 11, 2005 – 12:05 am
I’ve been distracted by worldly matters for a day or two, so all I have to offer tonight is yet another of those parasitic posts in which I merely present a link to some interesting spot on the Web. Rest assured that some tasty confections are on the stove.
Today’s referent is the indispensible Dead or Alive. Just go take a look. No further explanation necessary.
December 6, 2005 – 1:00 am
Here is an interesting item from the 1010 WINS website. The headline reads:
Jogging Song Offends Relatives of Inmates
According to the story,
More than 50 recruits and their trainers jogged in formation past the jail last week singing: “Jailbirds, jailbirds, look and see. You’re locked up and we’re free.”
Relatives, who were in the jail parking lot, say they were shocked.
I agree that the doggerel in question scans poorly, but I hardly consider myself shocked. After all, if these recruits had the lyrical skill to be successful poets, they wouldn’t have to be out there jogging in the first place.
December 4, 2005 – 8:09 pm
There is a heartening item in today’s New York Times: the creation myth known as Intelligent Design is having a tough time taking root. The ID movement’s complete and unsurprising lack of any scientific agenda is apparently beginning to catch up with it.
December 2, 2005 – 12:22 am
It is easy for us to bustle though our busy lives without pausing to reflect that so much of our familiar and comfortable world was not created by us, but bequeathed to us by those who lived and died long before we took our cue to strut briefly upon the stage. Here in Gotham one tends to take the city itself for granted, as if it were given feature of the natural world, but if one stops to consider that every last brick, every nail, every floorboard, every window, every doorknob, every layer of paint in every one of the city’s innumerable structures, from the meanest toolshed to the loftiest tower, was carefully put in its place by some human hand, the scale of one’s indebtedness to those who went before us is almost ungraspable in its immensity. To these multitudes, almost all of them nameless and forgotten, we owe nearly everything – our cities, our nations, our languages, our religions, our music, our literature, our science, our mathematics, our art, our culture, and even the very bodies that we inhabit. I think it is worthwhile to dwell on this astonishing fact every so often.
From my remarkable friend George Beke, who might best be described as a cultural archeologist, a tireless scholar of the symbolic and esoteric artifacts of bygone times, comes an extraordinary insight into one of the most familiar features of our common cultural framework – the days of the week.
December 1, 2005 – 12:04 am
Looking over the science section of the New York Times yesterday I found the following response to an article about hypnosis (sixth letter down):
To the Editor:
Re “This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis”: The first thing that came to mind when I read that some people are susceptible to suggestion is the trance some religious fundamentalists get into. The article goes on to say that suggestion changes what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
That would explain the apparent contradiction in our most recent presidential election, where logic seemed to be turned on its head.
Was that 10 to 15 percent who could have been in a hypnotic trance enough to turn around an election and in essence undermine (undermind) the democratic process?
Mark Gretch
Raleigh, N.C.
What idiotic, insulting, execrable drivel.
Re “This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis”: The first thing that came to mind when I read that some people are susceptible to suggestion is the trance some religious fundamentalists get into. The article goes on to say that suggestion changes what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
That would explain the apparent contradiction in our most recent presidential election, where logic seemed to be turned on its head.
Was that 10 to 15 percent who could have been in a hypnotic trance enough to turn around an election and in essence undermine (undermind) the democratic process?
Mark Gretch
Raleigh, N.C.
What idiotic, insulting, execrable drivel.
November 18, 2005 – 5:17 pm
Here’s Charles Krauthammer, in today’s Washington Post, getting off a shot at “Intelligent Design”:
“How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too.”
Read the full article here.
November 18, 2005 – 1:52 pm
I’ve just spent a few days at PubSub’s Granite State Research Kitchen up in Nashua, NH. It’s in an enormous brick building that used to be a textile mill back in New Hampshire’s industrial heyday. A lot of these old piles, which are all over the place up there, have now been converted into high-tech office complexes, pottery studios, and cutesy-poo shopping malls.
The first thing you see when you enter the building is a larger-than-life wooden cigar-store Indian. He looks pretty much like the prefab one in this picture (I found this image here – hope its owners don’t mind):
Shading his eyes, the brawny warrior gazes past you into the distance as you come through the front door. Is he scanning the blue horizon for smoke signals? Following the flight of a soaring eagle? I doubt it. My feeling is that he is probably too embarrassed to make eye contact, not only because his descending career arc has brought him from hunting bison on the majestic plains of the West all the way down to hawking handfuls of Presidentes, but also because he has apparently been coerced into wearing, as a token of his subjugation, a fetching, knee-length, American-flag skirt.
I find it interesting that you can get away with that up in New Hampshire. Here in Gotham you’d have picketers outside your place in about twenty minutes.
November 11, 2005 – 2:04 pm
Here’s an interesting item:
A Miami-based film director is spending $100,000 on a piece of property. He plans to turn the location into a big-game hunting resort. What makes the venture somewhat unusual is that what will be hunted is “dinosaur-like monsters”, and that the property is located inside the online game Project Entropia.
They say the real-estate bubble may have burst. So who needs “real”?
November 1, 2005 – 1:31 pm
Today, the new Moon, is the day of Diwali. From Wikipedia:
DiwÄlÄ« or DÄ«pÄvali (also transliterated Deepavali; Sanskrit: row of lights) is the Hindu Festival of Lights. For Jains it is one of the most important festivals, and beginning of the Jain year. It is also a significant festival for the Sikh faith.
October 28, 2005 – 11:11 am
My good friend Jess Kaplan, who practices law in Sacramento, has just sent me an interesting item (written before Harriet Meiers withdrew herself from consideration) about confirmations of judicial appointments. One might assume that qualifications like a high-level clerkship, outstanding academic credentials from prestigious institutions, experience on the bench, an extensive body of written work, and so forth, would grease the wheels, but it appears that exactly the opposite is the case. In the author’s words, “The less sterling a candidate’s record, the more likely Congress is to confirm.”
Readers can find the article here.
October 18, 2005 – 10:58 am
Some years ago anthropologist Donald E. Brown published a book called Human Universals. Its argument is that there are cultural traits that can be found in every human society – universal characteristics that, because they are manifest in all cultures throughout history and in all environmental settings, clearly must represent innate features of human nature. Such an idea, of course, flies in the face of the “progressive” intellectual fashions of the past century, fashions that persist to this day, as discussed in a previous post.
Dr. Brown has compiled a list of these ubiquitous human traits; you can read it here.
October 13, 2005 – 12:55 am
I have already posted about Steven Pinker’s excellent book The Blank Slate, a salvo against the modern denial of innate human nature. In today’s Wall Street Journal Charles Murray, who as one of the co-authors, in 1996, of The Bell Curve was pilloried by the Left for suggesting that there might be inherent statistical differences among human genetic groups, has returned to the battle with an essay arguing that subsequent study has buttressed his position.
He has kept a low profile since his ruthless persecution by the Thought Police nearly a decade ago, but the recent tar-and-feathering of Lawrence Summers for suggesting that innate sex differences might have something to do with the low numbers of women at elite levels in science and mathematics was more than he could bear in silence. It is brave of him to speak up again, because he is sure to get little but contumely and derision for his efforts. I encourage all to read this essay, and to try to do so with an open mind.
September 8, 2005 – 1:05 am
I have been preoccupied by discussions with Bill Vallicella in this space, and should give him a moment’s peace.
In a letter to the New York Times (fifth letter down), one Linnda Caporael shows us once again how deeply entrenched the perverse cultural doctrine that Steven Pinker calls “The Blank Slateâ€still is. MS Caporael writes (italics mine):
David Brooks is right to see that the “bursting point†has come (column, Sept. 4), but it does not include “the elemental violence of human nature.â€
There is no such thing as human nature without culture and its institutions. The message of Katrina was not from Hobbes; it was from a neoconservative leadership: “Starve the beast,†feed the rich, abandon the poor, disgrace the nation. That’s not a natural disaster; it’s an American tragedy.
September 6, 2005 – 11:24 pm
Yesterday I left a comment on a post by Bill Vallicella (who maintains one of the most interesting sites anywhere in the blogosphere) about Richard Dawkins’ antipathy toward the “theory†of Intelligent Design. Dr. Vallicella has responded here, and I’ll take this opportunity to respond to his response.
There has been quite a ruction lately about the Topeka, Kansas school board’s wish to accommodate literalist Christians by introducing new teaching standards for biology. The proposed guidelines would suggest to the impressionable student that the Darwinian idea, in which modern organisms (including humans) arose through a lengthy process of evolution by natural selection, is mere scientific dogma, and that an alternative account of the phenomena — “intelligent design†– should be given serious consideration.
