Not swooning over the One the way you used to? Do his declamatory cadences no longer give you that old thrill up your leg? Is the bloom off the rose? Is the honeymoon over? Are you bored with the hat, and looking for some cattle? Wish you’d ordered steak instead of sizzle?
Andrew Malcolm understands.
Here’s a happy item:
More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA’s twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they’re still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling.
The message is, “Expect the unexpected.”
“It’s uncanny,” says Ed Stone of Caltech, Voyager Project Scientist since 1972. “Voyager 1 and 2 have a knack for making discoveries.”
Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished–and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself.
My favorite thing about the Voyager probes is the golden phonograph records they carry.
More here.
Here’s a harrowing video clip of today’s tornado in Alabama. The terror of the person filming it is palpable, and contagious.
In the wake of the latest massacre of US personnel by our Muslim “allies”, here is a response from Diana West.
We’ve lost our minds, and as a result the best among us are losing their lives.
We note with sadness the death of singer Phoebe Snow, whom those of us of a “certain age” will best remember for her beautiful 1974 song Poetry Man.
I did not know Ms. Snow well, but I did know her slightly, having done a few recording sessions with her back in the 1990s. She was an amiable person, with a ready and somewhat mordant wit, and in the studio she was a top-notch professional. It always seemed to me that her playful banter concealed some darkness within; it was not until much later that I learned that much of her life was consumed by caring for her profoundly disabled daughter, who died in 2007.
What a voice she had! I’m sorry to hear she’s gone.
You can read her obituary here.
In totalitarian states, you keep your private sentiments and beliefs about the world’s realities to yourself; the penalty is harsh for expressing opinions that conflict with the official line. Example:
Khruschev was busy denouncing Stalin at a public meeting when a voice shouted out “If you feel this way now, why didn’t you say so then?” To which the Soviet leader thundered “Who said that?” There was a long and petrified silence which Kruschev finally broke. “Now you know why.”
Are things really so different here and now? In an essay at NRO titled The American Soviet, Victor Davis Hanson argues that they are not.
I’m sympathetic to Dr. Hanson’s point: these days there are certainly many things that we all know to be true, but mustn’t say in public. But in making the comparison that he does Hanson overstates, and weakens, his case.
The crucial difference is this: had Dr. Hanson made the same points in the old Soviet Union, he’d have been hauled off to Lubyanka. But unlike Soviet Russia (or even Europe and Canada, where a dark night is swiftly descending upon the right to express “offensive” thoughts), the tyranny that binds and gags us here in America is still self-imposed. Though it has certainly taken hold of a great many of our public and private institutions (just ask Lawrence Summers or James Watson or E.O. Wilson), we need only look at places like Syria or North Korea — or even Holland, England, and Denmark! — to realize how free we still are in America, where it’s far more difficult for our P.C. taboos to take on the force of law. We can still cast off our chains any time we make up our minds to do so.
Meanwhile, though, it isn’t as if our pathological inclination to deny awkward facts doesn’t have serious consequences: for more on that, see today’s post at Mangan’s.
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to pernicious masculine oppression — and what do you get?
Inequality.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the State abhors inequality. So a few years back, into the breach it leapt — with all the sagacity, foresight, and subtlety of method we’ve come to expect. This has now produced the usual cornucopia of unintended, if not entirely unpredictable, consequences. Story here.
Are deeds objective? If an agent performs some action X, then X influences the world’s causal network in some particular way, with particular consequences. Does it make sense to say that for the same X, X is good if performed by “good” agent Smith, and X is bad if performed by “bad” agent Jones?
Why do I ask? I’ll let Andrew Stiles explain.
It’s another busy spell for me; I haven’t had much time to comment on the passing scene since putting up that brief eugenics post last week, and I’ve had no time for writing today.
But don’t touch that dial! I have something I’m sure you’ll enjoy: Ants As Fluids.
My birthday’s just gone by, on April 13th — but in case you’re wondering what to get me next year…
A story that’s been making the rounds the past few days (thanks to the indefatigable JK for sending along this version of it) has to do with recent research that casts doubt on a cornerstone of contemporary thought about human language: namely that we all are born with a “language module” that constrains possible grammars to a few basic systems.
This idea has become more or less hegemonic amongst linguists due to the work of Noam Chomsky (and subsequent proponents such as Steven Pinker), and has also been taken as a model for work on the evolutionary psychology of morality by people like Marc Hauser. If it’s wrong, that’s a pretty big deal; it will be interesting to see how the research community responds.
Learn more here.
A hot topic at the moment is taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood. Social and fiscal conservatives have allied themselves against it — the former because they think abortion is murder, the latter because they don’t think what Planned Parenthood does is among the government’s enumerated functions, and it costs money. Liberals support it, for all the obvious reasons.
But is Planned Parenthood actually a net drain on the public fisc? In Thursday’s Times, Gail Collins persuasively argues just the opposite. In doing so she hearkens back to old-time, pre-war Progressivism, and to one of the central principles upon which Planned Parenthood itself was founded: that because the poorest and least educated (and least educable) people tend to have the most children, and because a persistent underclass is expensive to maintain in a thousand different ways, then the lower their birthrate, the better the public balance-sheet. Therefore, in Ms. Collins’ words, “destroying Planned Parenthood is a money-loser”.
Ms. Collins didn’t put it all quite this way, but that’s the idea — and it’s how Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger (along with most other Progressives of the era) saw it, too. In Sanger’s 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, she wrote: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit: that is the issue of birth control.”
I don’t always agree with Gail Collins, but she may be right about this one. Fiscal conservatives, take note.
OK, enough politics. Time for a little Kumbaya, and maybe a reason to go on living.
Here’s a young Scotsman by the name of Brendan MacFarlane. And here, and here.
I haven’t written much about this — I hate to get involved in this sort of thing, and prefer to focus on matters of genuine significance — but I must come out and say that it’s downright weird that the great big noisy fuss about the circumstances of President Obama’s birth hasn’t gone away. It must be a terrible, nagging annoyance for Mr. Obama, and there is simply no good explanation for why he hasn’t simply put the matter to rest, because it ought to be trivially easy to do. To see a fop like Donald Trump swaggering about making political hay with it must be unspeakably irritating.
Anticipating objections, let me reduce the question to a few essential points.
There are those who say: “The President has released an official document from the state of Hawaii. Case closed.”
Well, not quite. The document that has been made public is something called a ‘Certification of Live Birth’. This form, often referred to as a COLB, is a secondary, post-hoc document usually issued when, for example, a person’s original birth certificate is in a foreign language. It refers to, and derives its authority from, the underlying primary document, which in Hawaii would have had been called by a confusingly similar name: a long-form ‘Certificate of Live Birth’, or more commonly, a ‘birth certificate’. This is the official record made at the time of birth, with detailed information including the attending physician’s name, and so forth.
Did whoever issued the COLB have the actual birth certificate to refer to? If so, then why not just release that? It’s a mere triviality, presumably, and yet Mr. Obama doesn’t do it. Why on Earth not? You or I, or anybody else, would get it out there in a heartbeat; it would immediately put an end to all of this nonsense, just like that. It makes no sense not to do so.
Did the issuing party not have the original in hand? Then on what authority was the COLB issued? (There are also various other questions about its authenticity.)
There are contemporaneous newspaper announcements, which indeed add circumstantial support. But if, as others have suggested, there may be other complexities to the details of Mr. Obama’s arrival, the announcements may have been placed, by a family in awkward circumstances, in order to obscure questions of timing or legitimacy. They certainly are not legal documents; anyone can place an ad.
Again — all of this is terribly tiresome, and I have — seriously! — no agenda here. While I would of course love to see him gone, I will remind all of you that getting the sitting President tossed out on some technicality would put Joe Biden in the Oval Office. So I want to be clear: as far as I’m concerned, this birther stuff is just a bizarre distraction. My preference is that we rebut and refute Mr. Obama’s destructive ideology in public discourse, confound his grand schemes within the normal political channels, and work toward that happy day in 2012 when we will see the man put out of office in a fair election.
But it sure is odd. Why the heck doesn’t the President just pony up the real birth certificate, and at a single stroke put an end to all this tomfoolery? Until he does, this distraction — which is increasingly a political liability — will never go away. I just don’t understand it. Do you?
I’ve been busy, so for tonight, with the budget debate on everybody’s mind, just a brief item: a post by statistician William Briggs that has as its central feature a starkly simple graph, devoid of any ideological content. It merely plots the amount spent by the US government per capita, year by year, in inflation-adjusted dollars.
A log scale is needed on the money axis, because the rise is so steep: the amount has doubled — doubled! — in a single generation. It has risen a hundredfold in the last century. Make of that what you will.
Here.
(Hat tip: John D.)
We note with sorrow the death, at 66, of the great recording engineer Roger Nichols — best known for the immaculate recordings and mixes he made with Steely Dan. His artistic brilliance and superb technical craftsmanship were an inspiration to me and to countless other engineers.
His New York Times obituary is here.
As I write, the Dow is collapsing; it’s down 237 points, and heading south. The reason? Standard and Poor’s has downgraded its long-term outlook for the US to “negative”. The reason for that? Simply put, we’ve utterly failed to demonstrate that we are serious about controlling our exploding public debt.
We’ve been hurtling toward a very tall cliff for a long time now; we may finally be going over it. If today isn’t the day, rest assured that it’s coming soon.
Meanwhile: remember the Gabrielle Giffords shooting? Remember the reeking cloud of opprobrium emitted by prominent figures on the Left, and their despicable attempt to blame a psychotic loner’s murderous rampage on the Right’s lack of “civility”? Remember their pious calls for a new era of politeness in public discourse, lest there be more “victims” of the Right’s “inflammatory” dissent?
Well, in today’s Times out slithers the worst of the lot, Paul Krugman — the arch-Keynesian liberal polemicist for whom the only problem with US deficits is that they aren’t vast enough — with a column entitled “Let’s Not Be Civil”.
By his own logic, this is nothing less than an incitement to political violence. But very well, then, Mr. Krugman, have it your way: if you would like for us all not to be civil any longer, I’m sure that can be arranged.
Who’s Doyle Dykes? Just one of the best finger-pickers alive. If you’ve never heard him play, you’re in for a treat.
Here’s his version of that country classic, Wabash Cannonball.
This might be worth watching (I can’t say for sure, because I haven’t watched it myself yet): a debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig.
The conservative blogosphere is abuzz over Nancy Pelosi’s revealing remark that “Elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”
A sample here, from Steven Hayward at Powerline.
In a timely follow-up to our previous post, here’s an article from Science Daily:
Cultural Differences Are Evident Deep in the Brain of Caucasian and Asian People
The lead paragraph:
People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds. Cultural differences are evident very deep in the brain, challenging a commonsense notion that culture is skin deep.
The assumption made by the researchers here is that the biology of the human brain, and therefore important aspects of the way it functions, are altered and conditioned by culture — as summed up in the closing paragraph:
“We often feel that culture is like clothes; you strip them off, and we are all humans,” [researcher Shinobu] Kitayama says. “There’s some truth to that, but studies like this begin to demonstrate that culture can go much deeper. What appears to be a natural being, or a human mind, may be culturally shaped or formed.”
Note the presumptive directionality here: culture determines biology. But where do cultural differences come from in the first place? They aren’t drawn from a deck of cards, and they don’t fall from the sky.
Far more likely, in my opinion: the same selection pressures that account for the radiations of biologically varying human groups are at the root of variations in culture. But it’s a two-way street: the memetic environment of culture itself can have a profound effect on differential reproduction, which means that once the ball gets rolling, culture and biology start feeding back into each other (for example, it seems likely to me that the selection pressure on Ashkenazi Jews for various cognitive skills, due to cultural restrictions over many centuries, is what resulted in that population’s having the highest average IQ of any human group).
So: chicken or egg? It’s more like chicken egg foo yung.
In the (rambling) discussion thread to Sunday’s post, commenter Dom gave us a quote from Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest:
He quotes a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences “We were asked to look into what accounted for ”¦ the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past 20 years we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion. Christianity.’
Over at Mangan’s, our friend Dennis has taken up this passage in an interesting post of his own, The Curiosity Deficit of the East. I left the following comment:
When I read this I wondered if the Chinese scholar himself had said any more about why this should be so: about what, exactly it was about Christianity that they thought best explained. As it turns out, the next line of the quoted passage reads (my emphasis):
“The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”
It is very interesting that a representative of a state-sponsored academic institution of the Communist and officially atheistic People’s Republic of China would come to this conclusion, and even more interesting that he would be permitted to express it publicly.
I’d still like to know more. In what way, specifically — by what mechanism — did these scholars think that Christian morality accounted for the West’s flamboyant (and flamboyantly capitalistic!) success?
There are two parts to this. First, the “emergence of capitalism”. What about Christian morality uniquely fosters capitalism?
Then there’s the “transition to democratic politics”. Implicit in this is the remarkable assertion (for a Chinese scholar to make in public, at least) that democracy is a key factor in our global domination. And of course Christianity explicitly distinguishes between God and Caesar. But again: why do you suppose the Chinese Academy of the Social Science concluded that Christian morality is more conducive to democracy than to collective socialism?
Any thoughts?
From today’s Physorg newsletter:
So much for drowning your sorrows
Alcohol helps the brain remember, says new study
They’re still kind of short and skinny
First galaxies were born much earlier than expected
This is news?
Europe may be slowly disappearing under Africa
Enough with the fracking leaks!
Fracking leaks may make gas ‘dirtier’ than coal
Like I told you, Duncan: inhale twice, exhale once
Scots carbon emissions could be halved in decades, study suggests
I yammer on a lot about liberty in these pages, and sound the alarm when I think it is threatened. For all of that, though, I’m not an extreme libertarian; limitations on liberty are necessary for a well-functioning society. I just don’t like to see it limited beyond necessity, and I don’t like policies whose unintended consequences include creating conditions that necessitate further limitations.
So what constitutes a meaningful limitation of liberty?
Imagine the following curious scenario. You live in a world with a strict system of laws: everything that is not explicitly permitted is forbidden. (Don’t worry about how the laws are enforced; let’s say there is some automated monitoring system in place that operates with 100% effectiveness, and the punishment is swift and harsh.) Imagine further that you are the only inhabitant of this world.
Now let’s add a further curious stipulation: everything that you choose to do during the course of your life is on the list of permitted acts. (Since this is just a thought experiment, lets say that our law-enforcement bot is able to look back in time, and program a list of everything you will choose to do during your life into its list of what isn’t forbidden.)
A strange situation! It will seem to you as if there are no restrictions whatsoever on your liberty. But that’s hardly the case: the list of forbidden acts is in fact infinitely larger than the list of what’s allowed: it’s just that you’ll never notice. The list of what you can do is so tightly shrink-wrapped around what you will ever want to do that there’s no apparent problem.
Now let’s say we add a second individual, a perfect clone of you. Do the laws have to change? Well, yes, they do, a little: while almost all of the individual acts you’ll chose will be the same, in the interest of harmony and justice there will be some acts that will have to be forbidden, namely those acts that impinge unfairly on the other person. Spinning around firing a machine gun in all directions, or eating all of the other person’s food, for example, might need to go onto the “forbidden” list. But beyond accommodations of that sort, the laws won’t have to change that much, because, being perfect clones, you both will be inclined to toward pretty much exactly the same actions. So even though the list of forbidden acts is infinitely larger than the list of what’s permitted, you’ll both still have a sense of enjoying almost perfect liberty.
OK: so far we can describe the legal system of our little world according to the following meta-rules:
1) Acts that impinge on others in harmful or unwelcome ways are forbidden.
2) All voluntary acts that happen to be chosen by any individual during his or her lifetime are explicitly permitted, except where proscribed by 1).
3) Every act that is not voluntarily chosen by someone is forbidden for all.
What we see then, is that 3) is starting to lose whatever relevance it ever had. Even though 3) puts on the list an infinitely large collection of forbidden acts, and therefore in principle constitutes a gigantic limitation of liberty, it is not a meaningful limitation, because we never notice it. What limits liberty in a way we will actually feel is 1).
So: what factors might increase the effect of 1)? Well, if we imagine our little world to be populated with clones of ourselves, odds are that since we’ll be doing almost exactly the same sorts of things, the effect will tend to be muted. But increasing the number of copies of ourselves will surely have an effect; there will be more of us going after finite resources, etc., and so some new laws will have to be added to the blacklist to keep things running smoothly (you can’t take more than a certain share of a resource, etc.).
Here’s another way to increase the limiting effect of 1): instead of populating our little world with clones of ourself, we use near-duplicates. Now, because the list of acts we’ll voluntarily choose is going to start to diverge, the ways your acts can “impinge on me in harmful or unwelcome ways” is going to increase. For example, in a world of clones we’ll all want to be awake at the same time, and sleep at the same time; but now you might like to sleep during the day and play the drums on your porch all night while I’m trying to get some rest. Meanwhile I might like to render animal bones into glue in my spare time, while you don’t like the smell. So we’ll need some new additions to the forbidden list. Because these are voluntary acts that would have been permitted in our original setup, I’m going to feel the difference. These are meaningful limitations of liberty. But most of the time we’ll still keep out of each other’s way, because as near-duplicates we are going to engage in pretty much the same behaviors. I like to have parties on Friday night, but so do you. I like to sit on the beach in the nude, but so do you. And so on. So all of this is permitted, and our liberty is only minimally affected.
It’s important to pause here to remember also that under 3), there are uncountable numbers of things that are NOT permitted, simply because they are not things that any of us would choose to do. But as we mentioned above: 3), though it makes by far the biggest contribution to the forbidden list and therefore is the biggest actual limitation of our liberty, makes no meaningful limitations, because it doesn’t prevent us from doing anything we’d ever want to do anyway. It is negligible. In our world of clones or near-clones, although our list of permitted actions is actually very tightly constrained by law under the effect of 3), we don’t notice, and so don’t care.
The point of all this? The only restrictions of liberty that affect us in any practical sense are restrictions of the liberty to do those things that we would ever want to do anyway. Because in the real world we don’t have the time-traveling omniscience of the law-bot in our toy world, we don’t know in advance the full list of what the members of our society might want to do, so we try to make more general rules that we think will suffice to grant us all the liberties we need. And course, our thought-experiment world includes that strange proviso 3), where everything that nobody would ever want to do is prohibited. But as we have seen, 3) has no meaningful effect; the real action comes from 1) and 2). Take away 3), and what you have left is a society that, because it seeks to prohibit only that “which impinges on others in harmful or unwelcome ways”, would probably flatter itself as being quite “free”.
Now let’s go a little further: instead of near-duplicates of ourself, we populate our kleine Welt with total strangers who are as unlike us as they could possibly be, in all the ways you can imagine: political views, social customs and rituals, diet, living arrangements, religion, and so on. This is going to dramatically increase the effect of 1); a great many things that were previously permitted will no longer be. We should note that it is also the case that more will be permitted under 2), because there will be a greater variety of voluntary choices being made — but those new additions to the permitted-actions list brought about by those who are maximally unlike us won’t have much of an effect on increasing our liberty in a meaningful way, because most of them will not be actions that we ever would have chosen in the first place, or will choose even if they become available to us.
From all this, then, we can conclude that in our little thought-experiment world, liberty — meaningful liberty, the kind that actually affects people’s lives — is maximal for a single individual, reduced a little for a small group of exactly similar individuals, reduced somewhat more for a small group of highly similar individuals, reduced further for larger groups of highly similar individuals, and reduced more and more as the heterogeneity — the diversity — of the population increases.
What about the real world?
The taxonomy of contemporary conservatism isn’t simple; it’s more of a bush than a tree. Nevertheless, we can point to at least one major bifurcation — at the level of phyla, one could say — and that is the split between secular and Christian conservatism.
Christian conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan or Lawrence Auster, see Christianity as the bones and sinews of Euro-American civilization — the essential structural framework that has shaped and supported it throughout its history. To them the secularizing trend in the modern West, and with it the loss of the moral compass and social fascia that religion provides, is the key to understanding our culture’s decline.
On the other hand, Western Christianity has also arguably become, by its radical inclusiveness and universalism, an important force for the deracination and ethno-cultural deliquescence of Europe and The United States. (This is, of course, a hot topic on the religious Right.)
The West has not only been defined by Christianity, though; for most of Christian history it has also imagined itself to define it. This, however, has been changing, and Christendom’s center of gravity has been moving south: most significantly, to Africa and Latin America. As it has adapted to these places, it has changed a great deal, and has taken on many alien characteristics of local traditions: ancestor and idol worship, pantheism, and ethnic determinism of a sort that puts it, in many cases, in direct opposition to Western interests, and in particular those interests championed by Western conservatives. Christianity in its European form may soon be quite irrelevant.
At Alternative Right, Matthew Roberts discusses all of this in a substantial essay. Here.
Here’s the latest stab at a neurological explanation of political attitudes: a study that associates conservatism with larger amygdalas, and liberalism with larger anterior cingulate gyruses.
We read:
Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say.
…There had also been many prior psychological reports showing that conservatives are more sensitive to threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty, while liberals tend to be more open to new experiences.
Of course reports like this must generally be consumed cum grano salis, but perhaps there’s something to it: conservatives, wary to keep civilization safely on the rails, are more likely to notice when policymakers set a course that is likely to lead to a train-wreck — while liberals, their heads blithely filled with “conflicting information” and hungry for “new experiences”, like nothing better than to yank the throttle open and start shoveling coal.
Story here.
Muammar Qaddafi has sent a letter to President Obama. Here it is:
Our son, Excellency,
President Obama
U.S.A
We have been hurt more morally that physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. We still pray that you continue to be president of the U.S.A. We Endeavour and hope that you will gain victory in the new election campaigne. You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action. I am sure that you are able to shoulder the responsibility for that. Enough evidence is available, Bearing in mind that you are the president of the strongest power in the world nowadays, and since Nato is waging an unjust war against a small people of a developing country. This country had already been subjected to embargo and sanctions, furthermore it also suffered a direct military armed aggression during Reagan’s time. This country is Libya. Hence, to serving world peace … Friendship between our peoples … and for the sake of economic, and security cooperation against terror, you are in a position to keep Nato off the Libyan affair for good.
As you know too well democracy and building of civil society cannot be achieved by means of missiles and aircraft, or by backing armed member of AlQuaeda in Benghazi.
You ”” yourself ”” said on many occasions, one of them in the UN General Assembly, I was witness to that personally, that America is not responsible for the security of other peoples. That America helps only. This is the right logic.
Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu oumama, your intervention is the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair. Libya should be left to Libyans within the African union frame. The problem now stands as follows:-
1. There is Nato intervention politically as well as military.
2. Terror conducted by AlQaueda gangs that have been armed in some cities, and by force refused to allow people to go back to their normal life, and carry on with exercising their social people’s power as usual.
Mu’aumer Qaddaffi
Leader of the Revolution
Tripoli 5.4.2011
If you’re looking for a tranquil place to live, the Institute For Economics and Peace has published a table of the most and least peaceful U.S. states.
The top 10 are: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, Utah, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Iowa, Washington.
The bottom 10 are: Maryland, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Nevada, Tennessee, and Louisiana.
Full list here.
If you haven’t seen it yet (and by now you probably have): a spirited — to say the least! — response to Congressional archdhimmi Lindsey Graham, from a Colorado pepperpot by the name of Ann Barnhardt.
Move over, Pat Condell! There’s a new kid in town.
Watch it now, before it’s taken down.
Today’s Science Daily newsletter featured a story about a new website that mines Twitter postings to make stock-market predictions. Given that stock prices are themselves largely dependent on the sentiment of the crowd, there might be something to it.
Read the article here, or visit the site itself: TweetTrader.net.
Andrew McCarthy, who has been on a tear lately, posted a very strong article today about the sniveling response by General David Petraeus and NATO ambassador Sedwill to the massacre of UN staff by a raging mob in Afghanistan. Read it here. And then read it again. What a nation of spineless, cringing quake-buttocks we have become.
Lawrence Auster weighs in also, here.
Update: the Auster post has been taken down, as explained here.
The other day I paid a visit to Google’s vast New York office complex to have lunch with my friend Greg, a former co-worker who took a job there about a year ago.
As you’d imagine, it’s not your ordinary workplace. Everywhere you look, there are comforts, amusements, and diversions: toys, jungle rooms, sleeping pods, whiskey bars, fitness equipment, lavishly stocked little kitchens, a full-surround Google Earth viewing booth, fabulous sculptures made of Legos and K’Nex, “jam rooms” equipped with musical instruments, and so on. Workers come and go as they please, and are fed gratis at any of several outstanding cafeterias. Dress is completely informal, and everybody gets one day each week to work on whatever they like. There’s hardly any supervision or hierarchy — people just sort of understand what’s needed, and know their job is to make it happen in the cleverest way they can.
Everyone I met assumed I was there for an interview, and couldn’t help telling me what a fantastic place it was to work.
It being a mild day, Greg and I dined al fresco on a high terrace with a sweeping view of Midtown. (I had a delightful osso buco, he some freshly made sushi.) We talked about what his new life was like. Yes, he said, the physical perks were nice, but what really made the place so extraordinary was “the culture”.
His use of that word crystallized for me the effect the place had had on me from the moment I walked in. To get there, I had taken the subway from Grand Central down to 14th Street and 8th Avenue (two subways, actually), and the experience was as it is always is: crowded, blaring, gritty, and above all maximally heterogeneous in every way imaginable. It’s “vibrant”, if you like, and after living here in Gotham for more than thirty years I’m certainly well accustomed to it — but the effect of such a volatile and discordant public environment is to produce in everyone a subliminal wary tension, so constant and so routine that after a while one hardly notices it until it’s gone.
Well, when you walk into Google, it’s gone. Coming into that place, through the high-tech security checkpoint, from the teeming city outside is like passing through an airlock; it’s like beaming back up to the Enterprise from the steamy planetary surface. You can’t help being aware that you are suddenly in what feels like a different country. It’s culture shock.
Just how, exactly, is it so different? Well, it’s not the the creature comforts: for all its toys and free lunches, the place has nothing on a good hotel. It’s the people. Unlike any government or academic institution, Google is a pure meritocracy. Its employees have jumped a series of very high bars to get in the door, and as a result this building houses one of the most elite concentrations of high IQ in the world. En masse, it’s palpable. You can’t help but notice.
Greg said that he sometimes feels, working at Google, that he’s living in a “bubble” — and sitting on that terrace with all those bright people, looking out over New York City and enjoying my osso buco, I had to agree that he’s right. I realized that what Google has done is to create a one-way membrane, a kind of Maxwell’s Demon: as the world decays and degenerates outside, falling further into chaos, the entropy inside the Google membrane decreases, as self-organizing complexity emerges. That’s what Greg’s “bubble” is, and that’s what makes the “culture” possible: an extreme statistical outlier at the end of a long series of centrifuges.
Another friend (and another very smart guy) who now works at Google is my old boss from PubSub, Bob Wyman. I chatted briefly with him, too, while I was visiting. Bob has an interesting paradigm for thinking about the world. The way he sees it, good and evil are basically just a matter of thermodynamics. In a nutshell, good consists of reducing entropy, and evil consists of abetting it.
Google’s motto: Don’t be evil.
I hear they’re hiring…
Our surreal war in Libya has everybody talking. Here’s Mark Steyn:
According to the New York Times, “Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.’ We dropped bombs on Qaddafi’s crowd for attacking civilians, and we’re prepared to do the same to you! “The coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime’s forces have been punished.’
So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we’re also happy to serve as the Qaddafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it’s rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist he’s willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn’t exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we’ve got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side.
RTWT here.
Over at Mangan’s, Dennis questions commonly accepted ideas about sleep; it turns out that our sleaves may in fact last a little longer if we leave them a little ravel’d.
Here.
Over at NRO Andrew McCarthy comments on the amazing hypocrisy of the US government — particularly Sens. Lieberman, Kerry, and McCain — regarding Col. Qaddafi. I of course make no brief for Libya’s grotesque and brutal tyrant, but like him or not we had a deal, and our fickleness toward him — before their transmogrification into modern-day Catos, the three senators had canoodled with the Khadafys in Tripoli as recently as August 2009 in a meeting whose purpose was to reassure them of our continuing affection — is unlikely to encourage others with whom we seek to make such practical arrangements with in the future.
Read the article here.
I’ve been re-reading the Koran the past few weeks. I’d previously read it only in bits and pieces, and I thought it was time I read it straight through, with truly focused attention and an open mind — and I have to say it has been, to put it mildly, an eye-opening experience.
I’ve been rather harsh on Islam in these pages over the years, but given the transforming effect this Book has had on me I may have to re-think a great deal of what I have said — not only about religion in general, but also Islam in particular, and about the defensibility of our decadent Western civilization.
I’m still trying to digest all of this — my head is spinning, and the ground is shifting under my feet. I’ll have more to say shortly, insh’Allah.
On Wednesday’s Today show, Matt Lauer interviewed Michele Bachmann. He is clearly of the opinion that our joining Libya’s civil war on behalf of the rebels was the right thing to do; she disagrees. In the course of their brief conversation came the following exchange:
BACHMANN: …We don’t know how much al Qaeda is involved in the opposition forces. Why would we want to strengthen al Qaeda’s hand in North Africa? That certainly wouldn’t be in the interests of the United States.
LAUER: Well, well let me, let me flip that coin on, on its, on its other side. If there are flickers, as you say, of al Qaeda among the rebels, would it not be a sign to them or showing them that the United States has compassion and we are willing to use our military might to help all people?
BACHMANN: Compassion for al Qaeda?
This perfectly illustrates the absurd, oikophobic naiveté so prevalent on the Left (and to be fair, on the neoconservative Right as well) regarding the West’s relation with expansionist Islam. What Lauer is thinking here is clear enough: by bombing Qaddafi’s forces and arming the rebels, we can show the Ummah that we are suddenly reborn as a decent, caring people. Our jihadist foes, who would have been our friends all along if we had only been more compassionate, will take it as a “sign” that we have finally turned over a new leaf. Their hearts will thaw, and hand in hand we will usher in a new era of pluralistic tolerance and harmony.
The simpering effeminacy, cultural solipsism, reflexive self-loathing, religious ignorance, and psychological obtuseness of this are just breathtaking. Here we are, locked in the latest stage of a bloody, 1,400-year-old existential struggle with hardened jihadis who will not rest until we either kneel before their God or are annihilated — and Matt Lauer, convinced that way deep down we’re all the same, just wants them to like us.
If we lose in the end, this is going to be why.
In a recent study of psychological “priming”, boffins at two universities have turned up an unsurprising result: anxiety about death can incline people more favorably toward belief in supernatural agency and purpose, in particular “intelligent design”.
(The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking Dawkins”.)
Two things stand out: first, that people’s views on intelligent design vs. Darwinian evolution were unformed enough, prior to their participating in the study, as to be influenced in any significant measure by reading the brief synopses given to them of the two positions; second, the conclusion by one of the researchers that the study shows that people “may need to be explicitly taught” that a naturalistic worldview can provide a solid philosophical foundation for purpose and meaning.
Story here.
Readers, if this doesn’t get a rise out of you, I don’t know what will:
President Obama’s in town, and in a spirit of hospitality I won’t have anything to say about last night’s speech. (Anyway, everybody’s already said it, for example here and here.)
Instead, then: a grab from the Shameless Filler bag. Tonight it’s one of the damnedest eyetwisters I’ve ever seen.
The squares in the image below are arranged in four concentric circles. (If you don’t believe me, trace them with your mouse!)
This past Saturday was the occasion, once again, of “Earth Hour“, an annual smug-fest in which progressive ideologues the world over come together to thumb their noses en masse at the advanced civilization that feeds and shelters them, that allows them to take for granted a level of wealth and comfort unexampled in all of human history, and that gives them powers and privileges almost unimaginable a mere century ago: to travel anywhere on earth within hours by flying through the air; to send messages around the globe in the blink of an eye; to have in one’s hands, at a whim, any book ever written; to extend our senses to the depths of the ocean, to the surfaces of other planets, and to the most distant galaxies; to feed great masses of the hungry who in an earlier epoch would have starved; to extend our own happy years by repairing or replacing our eyes, our ears, our arteries, our skin, and our bones — or even by transplanting a living heart from one body to another.
Well, by now you’ve probably guessed that I didn’t join in the fun. The astonishing technological civilization that the genius and toil of Western Man has brought into existence is an achievement we should not only be proud of, but should also be very, very grateful for — and to have it sneered at by a lot of sanctimonious, self-righteous prigs with soft hands and full bellies irritates me more than I can tell you.
It turns out I am not alone. I yield the floor to Ross McKitrick, who on Friday summed things up nicely in this piquant essay.
My old friend Peter Kranzler, known to readers as the One-Eyed Man, tipped me off to an article in the WSJ about Bob Clearmountain, who is in my opinion the most gifted mixer ever to raise a fader.
I was lucky enough to be Clearmountain’s regular assistant for a couple of years, back when I was coming up through the ranks at Power Station — and out all of that great studio’s legendary corral of engineers, he was easily the one from whom I learned the most (with the possible exception of the owner, the former Motown engineer Tony Bongiovi).
Each day I’d come in and set up for the day’s mix. By the time I started working with him regularly, Bob had already established himself as a mixdown specialist, and so the projects had often been recorded elsewhere by some other engineer and just sent to us for mixing. Once I had the multitrack tape spooled up (yes, records were still recorded on two-inch tape back then), the tracks labeled on the console, and the effects plugged in, I’d always run up the faders and have a listen. As often as not the recordings sounded just awful, and I would always be curious to see how Bob could possibly make anything decent out of them once we got to work.
He never failed, though, and I soon came to realize the man was some kind of sorcerer. Over time I came to understand much of how he did what he did — Bob’s a happy, good-natured guy, and was never reluctant to explain his methods to his assistants, as some engineers were — but there are some things you just can’t teach, and he has them in almost supernatural abundance.
You can read the article here. And to get an idea of the scope of Clearmountain’s body of work, check out his discography, here.
OK, time to take a break from Mideast news. Here’s a beautiful fractal animation.
It looks like there’s going to be a little sectarian “disaggregation” happening in the Gulf States following that little Saudi/Iran Sunni/Shia proxy dust-up in Bahrain. Story here.
In Yemen, it seems Saleh is on the way out.
Meanwhile, it now appears that NATO either will or will not be taking over the Libya operation, and will or will not focus on regime change. Stay tuned.
Here’s a long and sobering article by Adam Garfinkle about our incoherent campaign in Libya. Well worth your time.
This is brilliant, just wonderful. I don’t know how I hadn’t heard about it until just now.
OK, readers: let’s all stop bickering for just a moment to wish the great William Shatner a very happy 80th (yes, 80th!!) birthday.
David Brooks, with whom I agree sporadically, published a pretty good item about multilateralism in today’s Times.
Throughout history strong nations, ruled by confident men, reckoned their interests, and having weighed them, acted. No longer. As a modern Western democracy, America — despite having achieved in recent decades a supremacy of power without historical precedent — now operates under an enervating double whammy: first the belief, now axiomatic amongst Western nations, that unilateral action is morally culpable, and second the intrinsic incoherence of democracies themselves, in our case combined with and amplified by the deliquescent effects of internal cultural disunity and low social cohesion.
In his article, Mr. Brooks looks at the first of these factors: aversion to unilateral action. He begins by acknowledging that nowadays “we are all co-religionists in the church of multilateralism”, then goes on to nail a few theses on the door:
First, multilateral efforts are marked by opaque decision-making and strategic vagueness. It is hard to get leaders from different nations with different values to agree on a common course of action. When diplomats do achieve this, it is usually because they have arrived at artful fudges that allow leaders from different countries to read the same words in a U.N. resolution and understand them in different ways. The negotiation process to arrive at these fudges involves a long chain of secret discussions and it necessarily involves eliding issues that might blow everything up.
Quite so; this is surely why we have no clearly stated objective in Libya.
Brooks continues:
Second, leaders in multilateral efforts often obsess about the diplomatic process and ignore the realities on the ground. The reports describing how the Libyan intervention came about are filled with palace intrigue. They describe the different factions within the Obama administration, the jostling by France and Britain, the efforts to win over the Arab League. It’s not clear who was thinking about the realities in Libya.
Who are the rebels we are supporting? How weak is the Qaddafi government? How will Libyans react to a Western bombing campaign? Why should we think a no-fly zone will protect civilians when they never have in the past?
In this, as in so many previous multilateral efforts, the process blots out the substance. Diplomats become more interested in serving the global architecture than in engaging the actual facts on the ground.
Third, multilateral efforts are retarded and often immobilized by dispersed authority and a complicated decision-making process. They are slow to get off the ground because they have to get their most reluctant members on board. Once under way, they are slow to adapt to changing circumstances.
Sure enough, the world fiddled for weeks while Qaddafi mounted his successful counterinsurgency campaign. The coalition attacks are only days old, but already fissures are appearing. The Arab League is criticizing the early results. The French are not coordinating well with their allies. NATO leaders are even now embroiled in a debate about the operational command structure.
Good points all; these are also many of the same problems that naturally affect the internal affairs of democracies.
Now we come to Brooks’s most important insight:
Fourth, multilateral forces often lose the war of morale and motivation. Most wars are fought by nations ”” by people aroused not only by common interests but by common passions, moralities and group loyalties. Multilateral campaigns rarely, on the other hand, arouse people. They are organized by elites, and propelled by calculation, not patriotism. No one wants to die for the Arab League, the United Nations or some temporary coalition of the willing.
This simple idea — that nations are more than mere propositional abstractions, that their bones and sinews are built on the shared passions and loyalties of a common people — has been more or less taboo in recent years, though of course it was transparently obvious to all, not so long ago. Now it seems to be in the air again.
Should America “go it alone” in the world, without regard to the wishes of its friends and allies or any sense of noblesse oblige? Of course not. But it is good to be clear about things.
There’s more. Read the rest here.
The Times explains why it supports military intervention in Libya:
Libya is a specific case: Muammar el-Qaddafi is erratic, widely reviled, armed with mustard gas and has a history of supporting terrorism.
Right, that’s clear enough: he’s a one-off, sui generis, something the like of which we’ve never seen before.
…unless I’m forgetting something…
No, nothing comes to mind. Anyway, no worries — I’m sure we’ll be out of there lickety-split, and all the other Arab states will be very grateful to us for helping.