Motus Mentis

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

With thanks to my friend Yaniv Sarig, here are some fantastic photos of Eyjafjallajokull.

Spring is upon us with startling suddenness this year; it will be, they tell us, 88° tomorrow. All over the city the daffodils and Callery pears are in bloom, and the pretty girls have shed their scarves and boots for skirts and sandals.

For the first time I think Eliot may have been right about April. I’ll be 54 a week from today, and as I watch the living world spring joyously back to life once again, I can’t help feeling that this time it’s running ahead of me, looking back and laughing.

It won’t look back for long, of course. Why would it?

Well, it’s been kind of an eventful morning. My response to a form letter from President Obama’s political strategist David Plouffe has led to a truly mind-expanding back-and-forth exchange, and, frankly, I guess I have to say the scales have fallen from my eyes.

I’ve been a pretty harsh critic of the whole Democratic political agenda — the provision of state-supported health-care for all, the benevolent regulation of the nation’s largest industries in the interests of stability and compliance with the American people’s compassionate long-term social and fiduciary goals, the restructuring of the world’s economy to reduce inequality and combat climate change, the expansion of our nation’s workforce and social capital by the importation of tens of millions of new Americans (and with it the long-overdue transformation of a cold, white-dominated society into a vibrant rainbow of diversity), and the general levelling-off of three centuries of headstrong American individualism, with all the damage and misery that has caused both here and around the world — but after these conversations I’ve seen the light, and it suddenly became clear to me that I have spent long and wasted years in the grip of a selfish and destructive right-wing ideology.

I realize now that it’s time America started setting, finally, a good example for the world — a world that is really just an inclusive community, of kind and caring people of all races and religions; a world that has done so much for us all these years. It’s high time we gave something back, and the Democratic leadership — Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and above all, our wise and loving President — are doing everything they can to make that happen.

It’s time we got out of their way!

With work and other demands piling on a little bit just at the moment (it’s Sunday at 10 p.m. and I am still at the office), I must take a brief time-out from blogging.

Meanwhile, please feel free to browse our archives (try the View A Random Post button at the right).

Thanks as always for visiting. We’ll be back shortly.

Enough politics for now. I’m tired of it all, and I’m going to lay off it for a little while at least, as difficult as that may be (well, maybe just the occasional link now and then). When I started this blog, 5 years and 1,688 posts ago, I almost never wrote about such things, and life was perhaps more agreeable for it. And while I know my outspokenness on these matters has attracted some new readers, I also know I’ve put a few old ones off, as well.

I do think there are important things to be said — our nation and our culture, which have stood against the storm so proudly for so long, are imperiled as never before, this time from within — but other, stronger voices than mine are sounding the call loud and clear, and I’m going to give it a rest.

So for now, back to other things — and there are so many of them — for a spell. I’ll probably post a bit less frequently for a few weeks as well.

The philosopher and “New Atheist” Daniel Dennett, working together with clinical psychologist Linda LaScola, has undertaken an interesting project: a series of interviews with pastors who have lost their belief in God. Dennett and LaScola have presented the results in a paper now available online. Here is an introductory excerpt:

Read More »

As often happens on Thursday evenings, I’m home late from class, with very little gas left in the tank. So for tonight, here’s an interesting website I ran across the other day: Floating Sheep. They count things, and make maps.