Motus Mentis

Just got this email bulletin from the Washington Post:

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News Alert: Gulf Coast oil cap in place over blown-out well
09:55 PM EDT Thursday, June 3, 2010
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A cap is in place over the Gulf of Mexico gusher, live video footage provided by the company showed Thursday night, but the spewing oil made it very difficult to tell if the cap was fitting well.

More information here.

Hmmm. I began to imagine other reports in a similar vein:

Fire-retardant chemicals have been applied to the conflagration, but the towering wall of flames made it difficult to tell if the blaze had been extinguished.

Or perhaps:

The defenders had recently fortified the citadel with a moat, hornworks, and bastions, but the hordes swarming over the walls made it impossible to judge their effectiveness.

How about:

It was simply too dark to see if the lights were on.

Well, as the blind man said, we shall see.

Update, 6/4: this morning I learnt that oil was expected to flow through the cap after it was installed. Apparently there are relief valves that will be closed once suction pipes are attached. My jeering and japery may, it seems, have been premature.

From my friend Jess Kaplan (not to be confused with commenter JK) comes a very interesting item about just what’s painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Here.

We’ll be away all weekend, joining our son at his college graduation. Back in a few days.

Here’s a pungent edition of Radio Derb, starting with an poignant obituary for England.

We direct you to an intriguing item at Mangan’s, about a “slow-aging” subpopulation that had previously been masked by youthful deisease and trauma. Here.

Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg and others are wondering about something that has been puzzling me too: if Faisal Shahzad was trained by jihadis in Pakistan, why did he make such a crappy bomb? I mean, the guy even had an engineering degree, for crying out loud. He used the wrong kind of fertilizer, propane tanks with the valves closed, little firecrackers to set it off, and had a couple of clocks wired up to nothing. A resourceful six-year-old could have made a better bomb. What gives?

Time for more Shameless Filler.

First: reader JK sends us this sample of high culture, American Style. (Try not to be too depressed by the remark right at the very end.)

Second: an annoyingly persuasive optical illusion.

Third: why we seriously need to rethink Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Finally, I hear you grumble: why does it have to be Shameless Filler Night again?

Well, you thankless whelps, it’s because in order to earn a crust, your devoted host must spend the near-totality of his waking hours planted, as sessile as a barnacle, at a Formica desk in a five-foot-wide cubicle in a fluorescently lit office on the eighth floor of a tall black building in a huge city, typing inscrutable expressions from a curious symbolic language onto a glowing screen. In a bygone era he might have been a frontiersman, taming a brawny continent with naught but steel and sinew, but this is what Men have become. Which is what makes our final item so very sad.

In every generation, some of us have children. Others, for various reasons, don’t. (Historically, most women do, and most men don’t.)

In good times, it is relatively easy to bring offspring to adulthood, and populations swell. In hard times it can be very difficult indeed, and only a few manage. When times are bad enough, lineages fail, and entire species become extinct. This fate has befallen, to within a rounding-off error, every species that has ever existed. It almost happened to us too; the entire h. sapiens population is thought to have dwindled to only a few thousand individuals as recently as 75,000 years ago.

What this means, then, is that each of us — every living creature — stands at the end of an unbroken sequence of incalculably lucky winners. This winning streak extends back through all the centuries of recorded history, through hundreds of thousands of years of unremembered human experience, through millions of years of hominid ancestry, through the earliest, shrew-like primates, through synapsid reptiles — back, back through pre-reptilian amphibians, through lobe-finned fish, back through the earliest chordates, half a billion years ago — and on and on, in a continuous chain of life spanning more than three billion years. And at any time throughout those uncountable eons, that infinitely fragile linkage leading to you, or me, or the squirrel in my back yard, or a fly buzzing in a swamp in Cameroon, could have been broken — by a predator’s snap, a falling branch, a cold spell, a hot spell, a drought, a flood, a fire, a virus, hunger, thirst, a successful rival, a dagger, a bullet, or any other of the illimitably many ways there are, in a violent and uncaring world, to die childless. It would have been the easiest thing, indeed the likeliest thing, for that absurdly, impossibly extended thread to have been severed.

But it wasn’t. And here we are.

Think of that!

Reader JK calls our attention (we’re taking a time-out in Wellfleet this weekend, and not reading the news) to an article in the Times about a new weapons system in the DOD pipeline:

Called Prompt Global Strike, the new weapon is designed to carry out tasks like picking off Osama bin Laden in a cave, if the right one could be found; taking out a North Korean missile while it is being rolled to the launch pad; or destroying an Iranian nuclear site ”” all without crossing the nuclear threshold. In theory, the weapon will hurl a conventional warhead of enormous weight at high speed and with pinpoint accuracy, generating the localized destructive power of a nuclear warhead.

I generally try to be au courant regarding matters military — but obviously I’ve been slacking off, as this is the first I’ve heard about this project. Read the article here.

Here’s Eric Hoffer again, writing in 1974:

The agitation about the population explosion is persuading many talented and enterprising Americans to have few children. The resulting change in the composition of the population will probably be not unlike that produced by war, which kills the strong and venturesome and increases the proportion of those least fit to improve and adorn mankind.

We see at present brilliant people agitate with all their might against the birth and advancement of brilliant Americans. They want to divert all wealth and energies toward the nurturing of the least endowed.

Before the Sabbath, p. 25