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.
June 1940 was one of the darkest moments in Britain’s long history. The Germans had overrun Western Europe, mighty France had just fallen, and the over-matched Allied forces had barely managed, only a fortnight earlier, to flee the Continent in the panicky and humiliating evacuation at Dunkirk. The Nazi juggernaut seemed unstoppable, and all in England knew that the full and fearsome wrath of Hitler’s war-machine was about to fall upon the British Isles. England was alone, and afraid.
It was seventy years ago today, at 3:49 on June 18th, that the great Winston Churchill gave his “Finest Hour” speech in the House of Commons — the third of three immortal speeches given by the newly appointed Prime Minister in those early, desperate days of the Second World War. His incomparable oratory and indomitable spirit united and rallied the nation, and gave the British people what proved, in the event, to be well-founded hope.
The speech was 36 minutes long; a shortened version was broadcast by the BBC.
Read the transcript here.
Listen to an audio excerpt here.
Florida scientist Dr. Rainer Meinke has a new and clever idea for sealing the leaking oil pipe. Here.
As the conservative eye surveys the field of presidential prospects for 2012, it is hard for it not to linger appreciatively upon New Jersey’s straight-talking new governor, Chris Christie. To understand why, have a look at this collection of video clips, which the National Review has gathered together under the title Chris Christie’s “Common Sense Porn’ Highlight Reel.
What with working all day, and class in the evening, I keep running out of gas on Thursdays. For tonight, then, a closer look at the dynamics of starling flocks, with video. Here.
Following on our previous post about violent ethnic disaggregation in Krgyzstan, here’s an item from yesterday’s paper that I found interesting. It begins (emphasis mine):
MOSCOW ”” The violence that has claimed scores of lives in Kyrgyzstan is frequently ascribed to ethnic tensions, but regional experts say the causes are more complex.
“I don’t believe in a narrative of long-simmering ethnic tension,’ Alexander A. Cooley, a professor at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and an authority on Central Asia, said in a telephone interview.
Indeed, ethnic distinctions between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz are so slight as to be hardly distinguishable, Professor Cooley and others say. Both are predominantly Muslim and they speak a mutually comprehensible Turkic language.
The most notable distinction, the one that is most responsible for the animosities that led to the recent violence, Central Asian experts say, is economic: Kyrgyz are traditional nomads, while Uzbeks are farmers.
That divide has translated today into a wide class distinction, as Uzbeks have prospered and now own many of the businesses in southern Kyrgyzstan, which has engendered resentment. Among the first buildings to burn in rioting over the weekend was the “People’s Friendship University,’ singled out apparently because it was built with donations by wealthy Uzbek businessmen.
Not a narrative of ethnic tension? It is actually, instead, a class struggle? I thought that was a remarkable thing to say, especially from a scholar who wrote in 2005:
The country is divided ethnically and geographically… The rule of law is often ignored in favor of clan-based politics and regional affiliations.
We’ve been hearing breathless reports today about how new geological findings have shown, to the astonishment of all, that Afghanistan is sitting atop a dragon’s hoard of mineral resources, an immense and “game-changing” cache of hidden treasure.
As usual, there’s more to the story. Here.
Reading today’s paper on the subway to work this morning I learned about a clever new way to cut health-care costs: pay people to take their medication.
In a Philadelphia program people prescribed warfarin, an anti-blood-clot medication, can win $10 or $100 each day they take the drug ”” a kind of lottery using a computerized pillbox to record if they took the medicine and whether they won that day.
Before the program, Chiquita Parker, a 25-year-old single mother with lupus, too ill to continue her job with special needs children, repeatedly made medication mistakes, although she knows she depends on warfarin to prevent clots than can cause strokes, paralysis, or death.
“I would forget to take it,’ and feel “like I couldn’t breathe,’ she said. Or she would “take two in a day,’ and develop bruises from uncontrolled internal bleeding.
But in the six-month lottery program, she pocketed about $300. “You got something for taking it,’ Ms. Parker said. Suddenly, she said, “I was taking it regularly, I was doing so good.’
Suddenly, she was taking it regularly! Turns out she’s a capable woman after all; all she needed was a little “incentivizing”. Of course, she already had a few incentives that might done the trick for some of us: inability to breathe, internal bleeding, and the imminent prospect of “strokes, paralysis, or death”.
Vague abstractions all, I guess. Nothing focuses the mind like cash.
You know, come to think of it, I’ve got some pills I’m supposed to take tomorrow morning, too. Somebody make me an offer.
On the front page of today’s Times we read about Kyrgyzstan, which is busy providing intelligent observers, at sanguinary cost, with yet another data-point about the incomparable blessings of Diversity.
Meanwhile, Dennis Mangan brings to our attention an outstanding paper on said blessings, by Australian academic Frank Salter (original here, but visit Dennis’s place for his comments and what will probably be a lively discussion amongst his readers, who are generally a sharp and feisty lot, with pungent opinions).
Some excerpts from the Salter article (Roman numerals are links to footnotes in the original):
Our conversation with Jim Kalb and Kevin Kim continues, here.
I’ve never been much of a soccer fan, but I’ve been watching some of the World Cup games this time around. What made the biggest impression on me, however, was not the play on the field, but the unvarying, awful blare of plastic trumpets that fills the arena. It is a horrible, buzzing drone, and it never lets up for a second.
The trumpet itself is called a vuvuzela, which I understand means, in some local tongue, “cheap piece of crap that makes a really loud vu-vu noise”.
The thing is LOUD: at its maw it has been measured, according to this Wikipedia article, at 131 dB, which is comparable to a Formula One race car in full flight. Multiply that by the seating capacity of a sports arena, and the result is an extremely large amount of totally pointless noise.
I’m not suggesting that spectators at the World Cup should sit in silence and applaud politely when goals are scored. The voice of the crowd is an important part of events like this. But stadium noise is usually a densely composite sound that varies continuously as events on the field unfold. It is a confluence of tens of thousands of emotional human utterances. Its individual components span the full range of the human vocal apparatus, and the attentive listener can pick out of the sound of the crowd individual people saying things. Sitting in the stands, you hear the voices all around you clearly and separately, while those farther away begin to blend into the general roar. Even that general roar rises and falls, and clearly expresses shared sentiments in the form of boos and cheers. It is a rich, complex, and deeply human sound.
But the vuvuzela offers none of that. It doesn’t even vary in pitch; it just brays away on a constant, deafening B-flat. It expresses no individuality, no thought, no emotion — nothing at all, except an urge to make noise. And that noise is disturbingly non-human: it is the sound, not of a stadiumful of people getting together to cheer their champions to victory, but of a world-devouring swarm of insects. It is utterly mindless, and as such I find it terribly depressing.
A friend of mine is heading to South Africa later this week to attend some of the games. I don’t envy him at all.
I’ve written in the past about the idea, popularized by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, of an impending “Technological Singularity”: a convergence of accelerating progress in computer science, neuroscience, and biotechnology that will, in a few decades, lead to a kind of critical mass in all these fields, with historically discontinuous effects. (If, as theistic conservatives often say, modern-day scientific physicalism has become a sort of secular religion, then the Singularity is its the beginning of its eschaton, the opening of the door to Man’s apotheosis.)
Not too long ago some of Google’s founders, together with Mr. Kurzweil and others, established at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA the Singularity University, of which my good friend Salim Ismail, co-founder of my former employer PubSub Concepts, is the executive director. I haven’t visited it yet, but it already appears to be a remarkable hive of creative activity. (Still no football team, though.)
Today’s New York Times business section featured a big front-page article about SU. Have a look here.
Traffic has been creeping up around here lately, and now is more than double what it was a month or two ago. I was glad to see it at first, thinking my humble star was ascending, but then I realized it was due to the World Cup’s official theme song, whose title is roughly congruent to this website’s.
So, to all of you mis-directed World Cup fans: welcome. Regrettably, I have nothing whatsoever to say about football, and my coverage of Shakira is scanty at best. Do feel free to poke around, though, and to give the View a Random Post link a click. Comments are welcome, and there’s no charge for the extra Waka.
I stand corrected. Following on our gloomy post on the Gulf oil leak, here, thanks to the most steady and stalwart of our Southern sources, is a story about a prior spill that still holds the lead.
There are at least two mitigating factors, however. First, the Ixtoc I spill described in the article happened in warm, shallow waters.
Second, that one is no longer leaking.
Too pooped to post tonight, so here’s a dismal item by John Derbyshire on the absurdities of our educational system.
Good news from Holland: I’m gratified to see that Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party made substantial gains in yesterday’s elections. Read all about it in this catty little article.
For weeks now, boffins examining the BP well-head videos with such techniques as particle image velocimetry have insisted that the rate of flow has been a good deal greater than the official estimates. Now the U.S. Geological Survey has joined them, saying that prior to the latest cap-and-suction manoeuvre the rate was probably in the order of 40,000 barrels (1,680,000 gallons) a day. That is a lot of oil. If this number is correct, then even with the cap in place the leakage is still over 20,000 barrels a day. (There is also a second, smaller leak that may be contributing another 20,000 barrels or so a day.)
I’m generally not given to doomsday-mongering (except when it comes to the downfall and decomposition of Western civilization, of course, which is already well under way) — but we are in, if you will forgive the metaphor, uncharted waters here. The world’s fisheries were already sorely stressed before this agony began, and it is impossible to imagine that bubbling over two million barrels of crude oil up from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico will not have widespread lethal effects far beyond the surface-level fouling we have already seen. That it is bubbling up from the sea-floor, rather than spreading across the surface like most spills, surely makes things far worse; it seems clear that there is already extensive underwater contamination as well.
We simply have never seen anything like this before, and nobody knows how bad it will get. The pocket of oil punctured by the well is so deep, and under such enormous pressure, that it may even turn out to be impossible to stop it with anything short of a nuclear explosion.
It is certainly at least plausible that this disaster might kill so much marine life as to ripple fatally across the food-system of the entire world ocean. If that happens, folks, things are going to get very nasty indeed.
Here’s a conversation-starter: the National D-Day Memorial is planning to add a bust of Josef Stalin, to go with the ones it already has of FDR, Truman, and Churchill. Obviously whoever makes these decisions wishes to acknowledge the Soviet Union’s key role in defeating the Nazis, but Stalin was arguably even viler than Hitler himself, and to honor him in our nation’s capital is, for want of a better word, grotesque.
Really the appropriate party to honor would be the Red Army and the long-suffering Russian people. Their valor at Stalingrad, under unimaginably brutal conditions, turned the tide of the war in the East, and broke the spririt of the Reich.
Blogging can be a dispiriting business, and most of us scribble away in near-perfect (and perhaps well-deserved) obscurity. Existentially speaking, it can feel rather like shouting up a drainpipe. So it’s encouraging to see a hard-working blogger’s voice rise suddenly above the din, particularly when it’s a voice that was deserving of wider attention all along. Meet Edward Hugh.
Jim Kalb, founder of View From The Right and author of the Inclusiveness essay-series that we discussed in a recent post, has dropped by to comment. Here.
It appears that our good name (which, along with our tag-line, owes its derivation not to Pac-Man, nor to the Muppets, but to the song Coffin for Head of State, by the remarkable Fela Kuti) has now taken on a somewhat unsavory connotation in our deteriorating popular culture.
Oh well, between this and Shakira, maybe I can cash in somehow. Meanwhile, listen to the real thing here.
It’s getting harder and harder to remember that this was once a virile and vigorous nation. Here’s an appalling letter from today’s Times:
To the Editor:
In “The Hard Sell on Salt’ (front page, May 30), it was said that the food industry successfully persuaded the Food and Drug Administration not to regulate the salt content in snack foods by arguing that to reduce salt in those products “would ruin the taste of the foods already low in sugar and fat,’ thereby making them unmarketable.
But if the only flavor being tasted is salt, sugar and/or fat, then those are junk-food products that the public would be better off not buying.
Thus, once again, the government has favored industry profits over public health.
Jonathan Zell
Columbus, Ohio, May 30, 2010
In the natural world, the organism’s life-cycle progresses from larva to adult. Liberal Western society shows us the reverse is possible too.
Pessimistic, black-hearted, hate-filled bigots like me occasionally feel the need to point out that Islam — not “extremist” Islam, or “radical” Islam, mind you, but Islam — presents rather a problem for the rest of us, and in particular is fundamentally incompatible with Western norms. Morally enlightened Western folks who want us all to feel OK about Islam (1,400 years of instructive historical precedent notwithstanding) usually respond by mentioning Turkey, or perhaps Indonesia, as edifying counterexamples. (There never were, of course, a whole lot to choose from, and lately the list is growing shorter. Pakistan, the go-to guy in years past, now seems for some reason to be out of the starting lineup, and even good old Indonesia isn’t carrying the ball quite the way it used to.)
In the wake of the IHH-flotilla ruction, and with Turkey now having announced its intention to use its Navy to run the Israeli blockade, Mark Steyn assesses Turkey’s brief and fading infatuation with the ways of the West, and its predictable reversion to type. An excerpt:
Demography is destiny, for the most part. For example, European Muslim populations are young, fast-growing, and profoundly hostile to Jews. European Jewish populations are old, fading, and irrelevant to domestic electoral calculations. Think of your stereotypically squishy pol, and then figure the reserves of courage it would require for the European establishment not to be anti-Israeli, and, indeed, ever more anti-Israeli as the years go by.
But demography alone isn’t always destiny. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. Bismarck’s famous remark that, if the British army invaded Germany, he’d send the local police force to arrest them is generally taken as a sneer at the minimal size of Her Britannic Majesty’s armed forces. But, in another sense, it’s a testament to how much the British accomplished with so little. Erdogan would not be palling up to Ahmadinejad and Boy Assad in Syria and even Sudan’s genocidal President Bashir, the Butcher of Darfur, if he were mindful of Turkey’s relationship with the United States. But he isn’t. He looks at the American hyperpower and sees, to all intents, a late Ottoman sultan ”” pampered, decadent, lounging on its cushions puffing a hookah but unable to rouse itself to impose its will in the world. In that sense, Turkey’s contempt for Israel is also an expression of near total contempt for Washington.
Read the rest here.
A reader sends along the widely circulated image below, with which the U.S. continues to burnish its gleaming international reputation for the education and intellectual engagement of its citizenry:
(I see the predicted low temperature was 49°. How I wish; we’re sweltering here.)
Jonah Goldberg also weighs in on the IHH flotilla debacle:
Question: If Israel is always hell-bent on murder, massacres, and genocide, why is it so bad at it? If its battle plan called for a slaughter, why kill “only’ nine people? Why not sink all of the boats?
… North Korea recently sank a South Korean ship. The international reaction has been muted and sober. Turkey ”” the Palestinians’ new champion ”” has been treating Kurdish nationalists harshly for generations; no one cares. The Russians crush Chechens, the Chinese trample Uighurs. Real genocides unfold regularly in Africa. Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb. Hamas is openly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. So is Iran.
And yet the only villain as far as much of the world is concerned is Israel. Always Israel.
But none of these facts matter. Indeed, it’s tiring even to recount them in an environment where big lies matters more than obvious truths, where self-defense is “aggression,’ where restraint is “genocide,’ and where the heirs of Gandhi wield steel pipes.
Why not sink all the boats, indeed? In for a penny, in for a pound, as the old saying goes: it is hard to see how Israel could be any more vilified in world opinion than it already is. There will be another “peace activist” armada testing Israel’s resolve before long, and perhaps Israel should make it clear in advance that this next one will be offered three choices: turn back, unload its cargo at Ashdod for transfer to Gaza, or be destroyed.
Another solution would be for some international body to assume responsibility for inspecting all vessels bound for Gaza, thereby shifting the onus from Israel. But who would that body be? The UN? Of course not. For the UN to do so would legitimize the blockade — and more to the point, it would defeat the actual purpose of the “humanitarian” mission: to give Israel no choice but to act in self-defense, and so to inflame world opinion.
Read Goldberg’s essay here.