While the USA backs away from further production of the F-22 Raptor, deciding instead to rely on the inferior F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Russia, as we noted here, is aggressively looking forward, deploying the impressive Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA.
So what about China? They aren’t sitting still either. The balance is changing. Learn more here.
Here’s a clarifying passage from Daniel Dennett on the idea that the findings of neuroscience prove that “free will” is a fiction:
Recall the myth of Cupid, who flutters about on his cherubic wings making people fall in love by shooting them with his little bow and arrow. This is such a lame cartoonists’ convention that it’s hard to believe that anybody ever took any version of it seriously. But we can pretend: Suppose that once upon a time there were people who believed that an invisible arrow from a flying god was a sort of inoculation that caused people to fall in love. And suppose some killjoy scientist came along and showed them that this was simply not true: No such flying gods exist. “He’s just shown that nobody ever falls in love, not really. The idea of falling in love is just a nice — maybe even a necessary — fiction. It never happens.” That is what some might say. Others, one hopes, would want to deny it: “No. Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn’t what people used to think it is. It’s just as good — maybe even better. True love doesn’t involve any flying gods.” The issue of free will is like this. If you are one of those who believe that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you probably thought it was.
Freedom Evolves, p. 222-223
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has written a fine post in response to a query from a reader about religious zealotry. The reader’s argument was:
Given that, as most religions claim —
1) There is an afterlife of infinite duration;
2) Those who live in strict accordance with the religion’s requirements and prohibitions will be eternally rewarded in the afterlife;
3) Those who instead violate the religion’s requirements and prohibitions will be eternally punished;
4) The quality of these rewards or punishments far exceeds anything we might experience in our brief mortal lives;
— does it not follow that it is irrational not to dedicate everything in one’s earthly life to the fulfillment of one’s religious obligations, with everything else taking a distant second place?
As Bill’s reader put it:
If this ranking system is correct, it is hard to see how it could ever be rational for one to pursue any set of mortal goods””no matter how well they rank on the finite scale””when one could spend the same time and resources in the pursuit of the afterlife goods or avoiding afterlife evils, which are both endless in duration and of infinitely great quality. If extreme fasts are pleasing to God, and increase my chances of obtaining salvation by a tiny bit, then the rational thing for me to do is to live in such an ascetic state for as long as possible, unless it prevents me from doing other activities that could do even more to promote my own salvation.
The argument given, then, mitigates strongly against religious moderation as a rational approach. Here in the West, where we place paramount value on Diversity, inclusiveness, and religious pluralism, we regard religious “moderates” with far higher esteem than those we consider to be “fundamentalists” or “extremists”. But does this make sense? Given the stakes, why would any rational believer be moderate?
The discussion turns to epistemic limitations. Certainly the polyinfinite goods of the afterlife, if genuine, outweigh the transient goods of this one. But if we cannot know with certainty that the rewards of religious fidelity are real, and are guaranteed, then perhaps they don’t tip the scales against the known pleasures of the mortal world. How is one to balance the two?
As Bill acknowledges, this is a difficult question, and he doesn’t claim to have the answer. But he focuses the inquiry with his usual clarity. One thing that emerges quite clearly is that religious “moderation”, if it is to be rationally motivated, seems to necessitate doubt. Or, to put it another way: for anyone who would make no distinction between his belief and certain knowledge, religious moderation is not a rational choice.
Read the post here.
On September 6th, 1824, at Monticello, the eighty-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to one William Ludlow (my emphasis):
…I have observed this march of civilization advancing from the sea coast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition, insomuch as that we are at this time more advanced in civilization here than the seaports were when [I] was a boy. And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth. You seem to think that this advance has brought on too complicated a state of society, and that we should gain in happiness by treading back our steps a little way. I think, myself, that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. I believe it might be much simplified to the relief of those who maintain it.
Meanwhile, in a recent Times editorial, academics George Lowenstein and Peter Ubel issue a call for the “machinery of government” to be expanded and adjusted to grind a little smaller — because even when properly informed, the citizenry, in an intolerable demonstration of willful insubordination, obstinately refuse to act as their betters have determined they ought.
We read:
Take, for example, our nation’s obesity epidemic. The fashionable response, based on the belief that better information can lead to better behavior, is to influence consumers through things like calorie labeling ”” for instance, there’s a mandate in the health care reform act requiring restaurant chains to post the number of calories in their dishes.
Calorie labeling is a good thing; dieters should know more about the foods they are eating. But studies of New York City’s attempt at calorie posting have found that it has had little impact on dieters’ choices.
Obesity isn’t a result of a lack of information; instead, economists argue that rising levels of obesity can be traced to falling food prices, especially for unhealthy processed foods.
To combat the epidemic effectively, then, we need to change the relative price of healthful and unhealthful food ”” for example, we need to stop subsidizing corn, thereby raising the price of high fructose corn syrup used in sodas, and we also need to consider taxes on unhealthful foods. But because we lack the political will to change the price of junk food, we focus on consumer behavior.
Yes, it’s shameful: allowing free men and women to make their own free choices in a free market, rather than simply instituting new laws and levies to make them do what professors Lowenstein and Ubel know is best for them. What’s the matter with us, anyway?
Well, don’t worry, we now have a new man in charge. Story here.
Wait — what’s that you say, Tom?
“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.”
Oh, you needn’t bother about that any longer. All settled, thanks.
In the Park Ridge Herald-Advocate, there’s an article (linked to in today’s Best of the Web) about what Peter, Paul, and Mary used to eat on the road. It contained this fishy little morsel from from Noel (Paul) Stookey (emphasis mine):
“Until the ’80s, there was usually the (standard) deli tray backstage,” said Stookey, calling from his home in Blue Hill, Maine, on the Atlantic Coast. “Then we had regular menus — some Polish meals, roast turkey with mashed potatoes, dressing and cranberries — and every once in a while, pizza. The most exciting thing, mostly in the ’60s, if a concert was canceled, we’d be left to our own devices, and we could go out to a movie, or have sushi, perhaps. But that was rare.”
Having gotten to know PPM many years ago, when I mixed two albums for them, I’ll bet you anything that Noel — who is a very funny guy indeed — threw out that last line with tongue firmly, as they say, in cheek. (He might also have added “And once when we were in Japan, we were served whale’s tail – but that was just a fluke.”)
His interviewer seems to have swum right past it.
The bottom having fallen out of the recording business, for the past ten years or so I’ve been writing software to earn my daily crust. You probably know that programmers spend a good deal of time “debugging” the software they write (I’ve often felt inclined to refer to the remainder of what we do as “embugging”, for symmetry’s sake, though so far it hasn’t caught on) — but you may not know that, just like their biological counterparts, software bugs have a complex and arcane taxonomy.
Some of the more exotic varieties, in fact, have been assorted according to a nomenclature that maps them onto quantum-mechanical and mathematical exotica and their discoverers. There are, for example, Heisenbugs, Schroedinbugs, Mandelbugs, and Bohrbugs.
Learn about these, and phase-of-the-moon bugs, and more, here.
Yogi Berra, on the death of George Steinbrenner:
“George and I had our differences, but who didn’t?’
According to a new study, Russians dwell on gloomy thoughts more than Americans, but are less likely to let it all get to them. We read:
Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy portrayed Russians as a brooding, complicated people, and ethnographers have confirmed that Russians tend to focus on dark feelings and memories more than Westerners do. But a new University of Michigan study finds that even though Russians tend to brood, they are less likely than Americans to feel as depressed as a result.
Not mentioned, it seems, is the obvious explanation: Russians, as far as I can tell, expect the world to be a cruel and pitiless place, and life to be a cold, weary, grueling and ultimately futile struggle — and they don’t have to listen all day long to pop-psych bubbleheads and workplace-fulfillment-counselors telling them how happy they are supposed to be.
I’d be cheerier too.
As you all know by now, NASA’s mission has been redefined by the Obama administration. The conquest of space having lost its luster, the agency’s new primary objective, as explained by director Charles Bolden, is to make the Muslim world “feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”
Our investigative-reporting team here at waka waka waka has acquired video footage of the first operational mission under this new directive. Here.
In a heartening development, the lower house of France’s parliament has voted 335 to 1 to ban the burqa. The measure, which is overwhelmingly supported by the French people, will go to the Senat in September.
Reaction was swift, and predictable.
“A complete ban on the covering of the face would violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who wear the burqa or the niqab in public as an expression of their identity or beliefs,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s expert on discrimination in Europe.
Amnesty International’s “expert on discrimination” is, of course, spouting nonsense. Given that rights are nothing more than human conventions in the first place, such a ban would not violate this alleged “right”, but would, rather, simply make clear that in France, the homeland of an ancient Western people with a magnificent and deeply beloved culture to protect, this particular “right” simply does not exist. No, if there is a “right” to be considered here, it is the right — which has even been explicitly declared by the United Nations — of an indigenous people to preserve its cultural integrity.
It is gratifying to see that the French, along with much of Europe, are beginning to understand that like any living organism, a culture without the ability to “discriminate” between self and other, between symbiont and pathogen, cannot survive. Perhaps as time goes by all of Europe and the West will become “experts on discrimination” too — expert enough, that is, to discriminate between what nourishes their culture and what destroys it from within. (The Ummah, of course, are already experts in this — as shown, for example, by the warm reception given to expressions of the Christian and Jewish faiths in Saudi Arabia.)
Reader JK calls our attention to a post over at InfoDiss: an animated rendering of nuclear detonations around the world from 1945 to 1998. It’s 14 minutes long, and very simply done, but I couldn’t pull away.
Here.
Writing in the Washington Post, one Stan Cox, who presumably grew up in the jungles of New Guinea, suggests that we abolish the air conditioner, an artifact of human ingenuity that I consider to be roughly on a par with the invention of the wheel, or the taming of fire.
Mr. Cox (rhymes with “pox”) swoons over the projected result:
In a world without air conditioning, a warmer, more flexible, more relaxed workplace helps make summer a time to slow down again. Three-digit temperatures prompt siestas.
In the emergency room.
Code-orange days mean offices are closed. Shorter summer business hours and month-long closings — common in pre-air-conditioned America — return.
Capital idea! We’ll shut New York and Washington down for a month. Just the thing for turning the economy around. We can make up for the lost productivity with more government stimulus.
After a long absence, ceiling fans, window fans and desk fans (and, for that matter, paperweights) take back the American office.
Well, I do suffer terribly in the heat, but if we could really have paperweights again…
Best of all, Washington’s biggest business — government — is transformed. In 1978, 50 years after air conditioning was installed in Congress, New York Times columnist Russell Baker noted that, pre-A.C., Congress was forced to adjourn to avoid Washington’s torturous summers, and “the nation enjoyed a respite from the promulgation of more laws, the depredations of lobbyists, the hatching of new schemes for Federal expansion and, of course, the cost of maintaining a government running at full blast.”
Of course! The politicians can retire to Jackson Hole, Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons, and those left behind can just enjoy Washington’s “torturous summers” au naturel, knowing it’s for a good cause.
Over my dead body, Mr. Cox. All I can say is that when they come for my air-conditioner, I am going to be awfully glad that this proposal came on the heels of the recent Second Amendment ruling.
Suppose you were to come round a street corner and almost bump into a person going the other way. Odds are, nowadays, that one or both of you will say “sorry!”.
This is new. Once upon a time we would have said “excuse me.” What changed?
I think it must be that the primary sense of “excuse me” has gone from meaning “please forgive me for being in your way” to “I’m coming through, please get out of my way”. Nowadays people might take “excuse me” to mean “what the hell are you thinking, getting in my way like that??”
Am I right? Has anyone else noticed this? If this is indeed what’s happened, what underlying social change is this symptomatic of?
We note with sadness the death, at 99, of longtime Yankee announcer Bob Sheppard, and of the era he helped to define.
From his New York Times obituary:
From the last days of DiMaggio through the primes of Mantle, Berra, Jackson and Jeter, Sheppard’s precise, resonant, even Olympian elocution ”” he was sometimes called the Voice of God ”” greeted Yankee fans with the words, “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Yankee Stadium.’
“The Yankees and Bob Sheppard were a marriage made in heaven,’ said his son Paul Sheppard, a 71-year-old financial adviser. “I know St. Peter will now recruit him. If you’re lucky enough to go to heaven, you’ll be greeted by a voice, saying, ”˜Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to heaven!’ ’
In an era of blaring stadium music, of public-address announcers styling themselves as entertainers and cheerleaders, Sheppard, a man with a passion for poetry and Shakespeare, shunned hyperbole.
“A public-address announcer should be clear, concise, correct,’ he said. “He should not be colorful, cute or comic.’
Readers of these pages will know by now that America, along with Western civilization generally, is most likely headed straight down the toilet. But it wasn’t always so. We’ve been focusing so relentlessly here of late on our accelerating collapse that I thought it might be nice to take a look back at a happier time, when a boundlessly optimistic America confidently and unapologetically led the world in progress and innovation.
I will confess that upon seeing this old footage from those “can-do” days, I had to blink back a tear for what we once were, and what we have become.
Living as we do in a world of chaos, crime and corruption, we should all thank Heaven for that citadel of Justice, that beacon of moral clarity, the United Nations — and for the courage and forthrightness with which it deals swift and righteous judgment to the world’s
vilest blackguards, reprobates, and scoundrels.
Just today, for example, the Security Council reacted with lightning swiftness — after an interval of less than three-and-a-half months — to the sinking, on March 26th, of the South Korean corvette Cheonan.
How did they respond? A naval blockade, perhaps, or withering sanctions, or even a multilateral occupation? No, no — given the enormity of the offense, this was no occasion for lily-livered half-measures. It was clear to all that the full weight of the International Community’s wrath must this time fall upon the Dear Leader, and so it did. Putting justice before mercy, the Council adopted a Presidential Statement declaring before all the world that the attack was — we just have to come right out and say it — kind of uncool.
The statement wisely stopped short, of course, of actually accusing the North Koreans of attacking the ship; after all, all the Council had to go by was the report of a major international investigation that concluded beyond any doubt that the Cheonan was sunk by the DPRK. And really, when you think about it, anybody might have torpedoed a South Korean naval vessel in disputed territorial waters at the North Korean border — I mean, it could just as easily have been a bunch of kids or something. And we all know how crazy that Kim Jong Il is; you never know what might make him fly off the handle.
But once again, order is restored, and we can all breathe a little easier tonight. That scalawag will certainly think twice before he tries any more of his shifty little schemes!
Thanks, UN!
Within the IRS is an agency called the Taxpayer Advocate Service. Here’s what it is, according to the IRS.gov website:
The Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) is an independent organization within the IRS whose employees assist taxpayers who are experiencing economic harm, who are seeking help in resolving tax problems that have not been resolved through normal channels, or who believe that an IRS system or procedure is not working as it should.
In its latest news release, the TAS discusses a teeny-weeny Easter Egg buried in the enormous health-care bill foisted upon us by the Democrats earlier this year. It requires businesses to file 1099-MISC forms to all vendors from whom they have purchased over $600 worth of goods during the previous tax year.
We read:
According to a graph-theory analysis of the two teams’ passing strategies, Spain will defeat Holland in the World Cup final. Here.
With all the fuss lately about LeBron whatsizname (and some soccer match that has apparently been taking place, I believe, in Africa), you may, like me, have been worrying that one of our most venerable sporting traditions was dying of popular neglect.
Well, worry no more.
As the Obama administration revs up its lawsuit against Arizona, we learn that meanwhile, across the porous border, schools are now teaching children to dodge bullets.
Story here.
The DOJ has now uncorked its long-threatened lawsuit against Arizona for the latter’s audacity in attempting to enforce Federal law to stem the disastrous tide of undocumented Democrats streaming into the state from across the border.
Blogger Ann Althouse examines the suit’s premises here. Her commenter “Mesquito” crisply summed up the seething frustration of a growing number of Americans with the Obama administration’s priorities, as quoted below (edited for typos):
Let me be clear:
A city may defy our immigration laws by declaring itself a “sanctuary” and the Obama Justice Department does nothing. An armed, uniformed member of a fascist, racist organization can position himself at a polling place on election day, and the Obama Justice Department drops the charges.
But a State legislates in harmony with federal law, and it is sued?
Seriously. I want my country back.
You aren’t the only one, amigo.
Meanwhile, another commenter points out that the Federal government is required under Article IV, Section 4, to defend the states against “invasion”. Surely this qualifies, no?
It seems encouragingly likely that the administration is preparing for itself a formidable legal and political petard, with substantial hoisting power. We shall see.
Here’s a timely collector’s item, if you can find one.
(Hat-tip to my colleague Yaniv Sarig.)
103° today.
It’s hard to think original thoughts while undergoing massive organ failure, so for tonight I will just add my own to the chorus of voices yelping in indignation over the interview that NASA director Charles Bolden gave to al-Jazeera. Here’s what he said (starting at about 1:11):
“Before I became the NASA administrator, [President Obama] charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering…
This is pathetic, absurd, outrageous, insulting, patronizing, insane, embarrassing, foolish, disgraceful… I could exhaust Roget’s and still fetch up short of doing this justice. But I needn’t bother, because others have got there ahead of me.
Read More
We’re back in Gotham, where, as it does every July (though somewhat tardily last year), the Hell-mouth has opened once again. It will be about 100° tomorrow, with suffocating, hope-crushing humidity. As always, I have begun to panic, to despair, to long to sleep at last in the cold, cold ground.
That said, it was a lovely weekend, and we had a delightful 4th. Although I agree with of my colleagues on the Right that the America of the Founding Fathers is probably doomed, if not already deceased, the victim of an aggressive campaign to vilify, destroy and supplant America’s Anglo-European cultural identity and the principles of individual liberty and enterprise upon which the nation was founded — nevertheless I still see Independence Day, and the bravery and vision of the Founders, and the moral and political genius of Jefferson’s immortal document, as something to celebrate, if only in the way that we mourn and honor our venerated and beloved dead.
We’re sequestered in Wellfleet, taking a breather for the holiday weekend. Things will probably be quiet in this space till sometime early next week, though you never know.
As usual — thanks as always for visiting, and feel free to give our “View a Random Post” link a try.
I am startled, and terribly sorry, to hear that Christopher Hitchens appears to have esophageal cancer. Story here.
Australia has a new Prime Minister. Her name is Julia Gillard, and in a gesture that would be utterly unthinkable here in America, she has announced that she doesn’t believe in God.
Being an atheist myself, it is difficult for me not to be delighted. But recently I’ve come to wonder, as a purely practical matter, whether secular societies are at a competitive disadvantage. In particular, I think they are in conspicuous peril from within when they admit large numbers of deeply religious immigrants from alien cultures.
I’m deeply conflicted about this, as you might imagine; it puts me in the difficult position of accepting that my culture as a whole may benefit from fostering beliefs that I personally believe to be nothing more than persistent, and often horribly destructive, delusions. I’m still brooding over it all, and may be for a long time to come.
But for now I must applaud Ms. Gillard for her brave forthrightness.
Which way is she spinning? Are you able to get yourself to see her going the other way?
This thing drives me crazy. Sometimes I can reverse it at will, other times it seems quite impossible. Forgive me if you’ve seen it before; it’s been around for a while. I just ran into it again, and thought I’d spread the irritation.
What will become of Stanley McChrystal now that he has been relieved of his command? How did this sort of thing play out in a different era?
Here are a few thoughts on the matter, courtesy of the Churchill Centre.
[This item filed under category “General”, of course.]
Here’s an interesting little item. In 2000, the Supreme Court struck down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion. In their decision they cited a policy report by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). A key phrase in the report said that the procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.”
It turns out, however, that this important statement wasn’t in the doctors’ original report. (Indeed, the actual report said that the physician’s panel “could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.”)
Guess who got it put in there? A name that’s been in the news lately: Elena Kagan.
Why ACOG should have been willing to sign off on this revision is another matter, of course, but it is startling that Ms. Kagan simply went in and altered the language this way. I think we might be hearing more about this.
Learn more here.
If you’re like me (which, of course, you are) you’ve been saying to yourself, as you have watched the accelerating march of technological progress these past few decades, “Yes, yes, all very nice — but where’s my flying car?”
Well, according an item in today’s news, it may now be on the way. Have a look here.
John Derbyshire (who, by the way, if he ever finds himself at loose ends in midtown Manhattan at the end of the workday, should get in touch with me because I will buy him a good glass of whisky), aired a particularly snappy episode of his “Radio Derb” podcast last week. Have a listen here.
Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and the longest-serving member of Congress in U.S. history, died this morning. I will leave it to others to provide the eulogy.
It’s unclear what will happen to his seat. The state’s Democratic governor will appoint an interim Senator, but whether a special election will be held this fall, or in 2012, when Byrd’s term would have expired anyway, rests upon the interpretation of a vaguely worded law.
More here.
Our friend Kevin Kim, whose academic specialty is theology and comparative religion (I recommend to you all his excellent book Water From a Skull), has been involved in a lively discussion about theodicy (also known as “the Problem of Evil”) over at Bill Keezer’s place. Bill’s position is that in order to arrive at a workable answer to the problem, something has to give:
In summary, the theodicic question arises from the belief that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent. Once one shows that these are inherently contradictory, one must select one to be less than “omni.’ This paper argues that the resolution of the theodicic question is to limit God’s omnipotence.
Kevin, in his initial response, broadly agrees with Bill. They are soon joined, however, by one Roman Dawes, who thinks the circle can in fact be squared, and the fur begins to fly. Read the whole thing here.
There is, of course, another view one can take, rather than selectively to deny God’s omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence — and it is a view that cuts the theodicic Gordian knot at a single stroke. It is simply to deny the existence of God.
I’ll confess I’ve always had a soft spot for the A-10 Thunderbolt. Slow and ugly, loud as hell — they’re about as far from “stealthy” as a 747. But they are the last thing you want to see coming at you on the battlefield, because in just about every case “the last thing you’ll see” is exactly what they’ll be.
Today reader JK sent along a link to a clip of some “Warthogs” in action. Have a look here.
About a month ago the New York Times ran an aggrieved piece, on its front page, about the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk statistics. The article, clearly intended to tar the police as racists, opened with:
Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.
At first I thought that they were praising the cops for getting the proportions right (after all, this statistic actually means that their stop/arrest ratio is correctly balanced across racial lines, and means also that if the police stopped whites at the same rate as blacks and Latinos they would only be arresting a vanishing percentage of the whites they stop) — but then I remembered what paper I was reading. The fact is simply that cops go where the crime is — but of course, because it is axiomatic to the liberal mind that any unwelcome systematic differences in life experiences between human groups can only be due to racism on the part of white people or public institutions, the only possible account to be made is that the NYPD is racist. Once the statistics were made public, the charge was immediately taken up by familiar racially aggrieved voices here in Gotham, such as the Times‘s own Bob Herbert.
So when I opened the Times’s Op-Ed page today I was surprised to see that they had printed a rebuttal by Heather Mac Donald in which she argues that the NYPD’s policy is a realistic and sensible one, motivated only by a desire to concentrate police efforts where the crime is. She cites uncomfortable facts that weren’t mentioned in the original report — for example, that blacks and Latinos together committed 98% of all gun assaults in New York in 2009.
The article printed in the Times today was in fact a shorter version of a longer essay published by Ms. Mac Donald on May 14th at City Journal. Having prepared a draft of this post back then, it is from that more in-depth piece that I quote below.
We read (my emphasis):
You cannot properly analyze police behavior without analyzing crime. Crime is what drives NYPD tactics; it is the basis of everything the department does. And crime, as reported by victims and witnesses, sends police overwhelmingly to minority neighborhoods, because that’s where the vast majority of crime occurs””by minority criminals against minority victims.
The Times’s analysis, by contrast, which follows in lock step with the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, assumes that policing should mirror census data. The only numerical benchmark that the Times provides for the NYPD’s stop data is the city’s population ratios. According to this analysis, since whites are 35 percent of the city’s population, they should be 35 percent of police stops, even though they commit only 5 percent of all violent crimes. But using census data as a benchmark for policing is as nonsensical as it would be to use census data for fire department activity. If a particular census tract has a disproportionate number of fires, and another census tract has none, no one expects the FDNY to send out fire trucks to non-existent fires in the fire-free census tract just for the sake of equal representation.
…Given the vast disproportion in the city’s crime rates, you can either have policing that goes after crime and saves minority lives, or you can have policing that mirrors the city’s census data. You cannot have both. If the NYPD responds to the incessant pressure from the Times and the city’s anti-cop activists to conform its policing activity to population rates, the law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods will be hurt the most.
The Times’s radically incomplete front-page story, like so many that preceded it, only makes the NYPD’s job more difficult. It fuels the animosity against the police that makes witnesses less likely to cooperate with officers and suspects more likely to resist arrest. It is crime, not race, that leads to more stops in minority neighborhoods. The crime disparities in the city are deeply troubling, and thus have been regarded as taboo. But until those crime rates are acknowledged, reporting on police activity through an incomplete racial lens will continue to defame the NYPD and mislead the public about its work.
It is greatly to the Times’s credit that they have printed this response, albeit belatedly. The all-too-frequent charge of racism is the most serious accusation there is in what passes for political discourse nowadays, and in their original article the Times provocatively and unfairly assigned blame where it isn’t due.
Here’s Peggy West, Democratic county supervisor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, explaining why all right-thinking people should support a boycott of Arizona over SB1070.
From a comment on today’s topic at Mangan’s, here is James Bowery, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Space July 31, 1991:
In short, the lack of a frontier is leading us away from the progressive values of the Age of Enlightenment, upon which our country was founded, and back to the stagnant feudalistic values of the middle ages… We forget the rule of law and submit to the rule of bureaucracy, both corporate and governmental; for in a world without frontiers, the future belongs to the bureaucrat, not the pioneer.
The topic: Does our failure to return to the Moon show that as a nation we have lost our vigor and virility? It certainly seems to me that we have.
Bowery’s words focus the question sharply: what is our New Frontier? What becomes of a nation and people like ours when we have no continent to tame, no civilization to build?
Read Bowery’s remarks in full here, and the thread at Mangan’s here.
In today’s Best of the Web James Taranto points out something both funny and sad. It’s the website of the Democratic candidate for governor of Nevada. His name is “Rory”, and the site is called “Rory 2010”.
But what’s his last name? It doesn’t seems to say anywhere… how odd!
Odd, that is, until you figure out that his last name is… Reid. He’s the son of the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid.
Taranto’s title for the item is awfully good: “The Gov That Dare Not Speak Its Name”.
Having got fed up with official press releases, oleaginous presidential puffery, and melodramatic news items, I decided to do a little spadework to find out what the experts are saying about this leaking oil well. I’ve found out, and it isn’t pretty.
What I came across was an fantastically long and detailed comment, fairly bristling with informative links, at a website called The Oil Drum. In short, the story is that the entire steel sleeve lining the hole is compromised, which means that were the pipe to be capped, the oil, under tremendous pressure, would simply blow out sideways and find its way to the surface through interstices in the surrounding rock strata. There is simply no way to plug this thing. The entire reservoir, perhaps two billion barrels (that’s billion, not million, and barrels, not gallons), may bleed out into the Gulf. It will be another two months before relief wells have a chance, and meanwhile the entire structure, from the blowout preventer all the way down the hole, is falling apart.
I haven’t begun to wade through all the links yet, but the original comment is here. See also this excellent graphic depiction of how the disaster happened.
I hate to pile on, but I just had to post this. It’s a 2007 clip of Nobelist Steven Chu (now Energy Secretary), speaking, um, gushingly, about how he and BP were going to “save the world”.
This afternoon, a commenter on our previous post asked me:
Malcolm, are you cynical?
Meanwhile, an old friend wrote me today to quote something I had, apparently, said to him when I was about 17 or 18. I don’t remember saying it, but here it is anyway:
Everyone needs a pack of lies to live by, and if you’d rather not create your own there’s no shortage of people who’ll be happy to hand you theirs.
So, I don’t know. Could be, I guess.
There’s a savory juxtaposition on the Op-Ed page of today’s Times. In the top-left position we have yet another column from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, calling for further government stimulus of the economy (he’s been tag-teaming with Bob Herbert on this theme for months now).
It begins:
Spend now, while the economy remains depressed; save later, once it has recovered. How hard is that to understand?
Very hard, if the current state of political debate is any indication.
Right; got it. Spend money when you haven’t got it; keep it out of circulation when you do. If your theory hasn’t worked after almost a trillion dollars of stimulus, that’s no reason to doubt the theory. Just keep at it. Another few hundred billion, and voilÁ !
There are support groups for people who apply this sort of reasoning at Foxwoods, but then, they don’t have Nobel Prizes.
As the Obama administration prepares its legal attack upon Arizona for trying, in desperation, to enforce federal immigration law, Allahpundit over at Hot Air reports that Arizona Senator John Kyl says that President Obama actually told him in a meeting that he won’t do anything about border security because it doesn’t serve his political interests.
Have a look here.
Meanwhile (h.t. to Dennis Mangan for this link), here’s how bad it’s gotten down there.
In this item from a couple of days ago, we learn that representatives of various Muslim nations have appealed to that supremely impartial and impeccably credentialed arbiter of justice, the U.N. Human Rights Council, to protest a rising tide of “Islamophobia” in Western nations.
We read:
“People of Arab origin face new forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance and experience discrimination and marginalisation,” an Egyptian delegate said, according to a U.N. summary.
And Pakistan, speaking for the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), said the council’s special investigator into religious freedom should look into such racism “especially in Western societies.”
Setting aside for a moment my partisan concerns for the outcome of the current round of our ancient mortal struggle, I must say I find several things to admire in this latest thrust.
First of all, there is the sheer moxie of it. In the West there are thousands of mosques, and the millions of Muslims living in Western democracies are free to practice their religion openly. In Muslim lands Christians are harried and persecuted, subjected to second-class status as dhimmi , and denied the construction of churches or open expression of their religion. Jews are routinely and openly referred to as apes and pigs, and calls for their subjugation or extermination, and for the destruction of their homeland, are commonplace and perfectly acceptable. But here in New York, for example, a new mosque — provocatively named the Cordoba House — is slated to open at Ground Zero, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, with the fulsome endorsement of our very own Mayor.
One can admire also the blithe unconcern with propositional coherence. “Islamophobia” refers to an attitude toward Islam — a religion and an ideology — but the complaints generally drift into accusations of racism. The West’s concern, though, is for the growing existential threat to the health of Western culture posed by the Islamic meme-virus itself, and it doesn’t matter one whit if the carrier is an Arab, a Persian, an Indonesian, or a converted Scotsman. The issue, in other words, is all about religion and ideology, and has nothing at whatsoever to do with race. But “racism” is still such a venomous accusation — despite its being used so promiscuously these days that it is becoming the Zimbabwean dollar of social criticism — that the OIC might as well fling it at us, knowing that there are plenty of exposed surfaces upon which it is likely to stick. And as for “Islamophobia”: as rational observers have pointed out thousands of times over, a “phobia” is an irrational fear. If, however, one believes on rational grounds that the spread of Islam in the West will transform and diminish Western culture in foreseeable and undesirable ways, then concern about this accelerating trend is no phobia, but sensible self-preservation.
But perhaps one perennial charge does have, at long last, a grain of validity to it, which I hope will grow as time goes by, and as we begin to come to our senses: the charge of discrimination.
Under prevailing Western social orthodoxy, of course, discrimination of any sort is all but taboo. The expanded modern liberal Western mind, stripped of reverence for its cultural heritage — and having shed, as a snake sheds an outgrown skin, the scaffolding and buttresses of traditional standards and valuations with whose support it was originally constructed — now floats, weightless, somewhere above the ground, inflated and unmoored, with no point of leverage from which to engage the massive objects moving all around it. It can only push against its internal parts, standing on one piece of itself to grapple with another; it has no longer any place to stand from which it can seize and take the measure of anything outside itself. It occupies a seductively agreeable vantage; from above the hills and valleys one can see a long way. But as it drifts away, it leaves behind on the ground below some very attractive real-estate — our ancient home and birthright — that will not lie vacant for long.
For those of you who pay attention to these things, a long era of American technological superiority in air-combat systems appears to be at an end with the deployment of the Russian Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA. This aircraft’s raison d’etre is to match or exceed the capabilities of our own F-22 Raptor, and early assessment seems to be that it does in fact exceed them. It certainly would make mincemeat of our cheaper and less-impressive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which has been favored for production over the (currently unfunded) F-22.
I’m still getting up to speed on the strategic ramifications of this — just what they will be is the subject of lively debate in certain corners of the Web — but if you are curious about this formidable new weapon, you can learn more here.