November 8, 2009 – 2:34 pm
For those of you who were puzzled by the sudden withdrawal of challenger Abdullah Abdullah from the runoff election in Afghanistan the other day, the Asia Times has the answer: he did so under U.S. pressure, as part of a complex deal brokered by our Secretary of State during her recent visit to Pakistan. Mr. Abdullah was considered by Islamabad to be a potential ally of India, and in order for the U.S. to strengthen its ties with the Pakistani army and the ISI, he had to go.
The agreement also confirms a tilt in US policy toward the real power in Pakistan — the military and intelligence services — and away from the titular democratic authority of President Zardari, who will become increasingly marginalized as events unfold.
What does the US get for this? The possibility of a way out of Afghanistan, with an uneasy “arrangement” of some sort brokered between the Taliban, the Pakistani Army, and a biddable Hamid Karzai, who presumably will be content with whatever arrangement allows him to maintain his agreeable lifestyle.
Read all about it here.
November 8, 2009 – 2:07 pm
From the AFCEA Nightwatch newsletter for November 5th:
The Taliban in Afghanistan now operate in more than 220 of the 400 districts in Afghanistan, compared to fewer than 30 five years ago. A new Pakistani Taliban movement has sustained insurgency in the Pakistan border regions and spread terror east of the Indus River boundary and threatened to carry it to India.
Iran and North Korea have continued to proliferate weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. Lebanon has no government. Most Central Asian states have returned to the Russian fold. Western China has become less stable and more unpredictable. Yemen is fighting a low level civil war that has now required Saudi Arabian air force assistance. Iran continues to send arms to its proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia. New Iranian made rockets now held by Hamas in Gaza can reach Tel Aviv, and maybe Dimona. Iran’s nuclear program continues to expand.
The tally does not look like progress towards stability.
November 8, 2009 – 1:52 pm
Our former Lieutenant Governor, Betsey McCaughey, offers a brief survey of some of the just-passed House healthcare bill’s salient points. Here.
November 6, 2009 – 7:16 pm
In a recent post we mentioned that some of the boffins at CERN had begun to suggest, apparently seriously, that the problems that have dogged the development of the latest generation of high-energy particle colliders — first the Superconducting Supercollider here in the US, and more recently CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — might actually be the result of some causal interference reaching backward in time to prevent some sort of Earth-shattering disaster.
The LHC has been under repair since last year’s breakdown, and is getting close to being ready to run once again. But to the folks at CERN, it must be starting to seem as if cosmic forces really are arrayed against them. Have a look here.
November 6, 2009 – 12:37 am
The topic of the day is obviously the massacre at Fort Hood. The news agencies have rather a hot potato in the essential fact of this story, namely that an apparently radicalized Muslim, a member of our own armed forces, launched a murderous attack upon servicemen who were about to be deployed to fight fundamentalist Muslims.
There will of course be those who will present the accused as nothing more than an angry, disaffected, garden-variety “mucker” — we must respect Islam, after all, and all diversity is always good, no matter what — but it is hard to see this as anything other than what it clearly is: an act of jihad, provoked by the intolerable stress of mixed loyalties: to the U.S. Army of which he was a member, and to his Muslim faith and brothers. It would be less ambiguous in the public eye, perhaps, had he donned an explosive vest for the job in the signature style of jihadist martyrs, but both cause and effect are nevertheless the same.
This story is not going to go away, nor should it. There is now going to be a terrible strain between liberal multiculturalists, who will see any reaction to this murderer qua Muslim as racist Islamophobia (it is neither), and those flyover-country sorts who will argue that it is folly to have an increasing number of devout Muslims embedded in an army (or for that matter a nation) that is at the forefront of the latest spasm of this ancient and sanguinary conflict with Islam. We are about to see a loud argument taking shape.
November 4, 2009 – 2:36 pm
On the front page of today’s Times is a story I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about before. It seems that the Iraqi security forces are using a bomb-detection gizmo that seems, quite obviously, to be nothing more than an expensive, tarted-up divining rod.
The gadget in question is called the ADE 651, and the Iraqis have bought at least 1,500 of them, despite their costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece. They are made by a British outfit called ATSC (currently their site says “Website under repair”), which so far has only managed to sell them to “developing nations” — which ought to tell you something right there.
Read More »
November 3, 2009 – 11:35 pm
With a hat tip to my friend and former employer Bob Wyman, here’s a clever way to get people to take the stairs.
November 3, 2009 – 11:14 pm
I’m old enough to remember Pan American World Airways, which throughout my early years was America’s foremost airline. I flew Pan Am on many occasions (including, once, all the way to Japan for a recording project), and through the misty lens of memory I recall the service and comfort being far superior to the cattle-car treatment you get from most carriers today.
Apparently, nostalgia for this iconic brand lingers also in the mind of one Anthony Toth, a resident of Redondo Beach, California. Over the last 20 years Mr Toth has assembled, in his garage, a meticulous reconstruction of a Pan Am 747’s first-class cabin, using parts foraged from a jetliner junkyard in the Mojave Desert. Have a look here.
November 3, 2009 – 10:42 pm
The other day our comrade in bloggery Horace Jeffery Hodges offered a post with a link to some old Calvin and Hobbes strips. I’ve always been a big C&H fan, and among my favorites among Bill Watterson’s many recurring themes were the strips in which Calvin’s dad would teach the restless wee lad about science. Featured at Jeffery’s post was an item about testing the load-limits of bridges, but following the link I found quite a few other instructive entries — in which we learn, amongst other facts, that the sun sets near Flagstaff, Arizona, and that the theory of relativity only works if you’re going west.
My favorite, though, is the final strip, in which Calvin’s dad explains why old photographs are in black and white. Go follow the link at Jeff’s place to learn more. (Philosophy buffs may end up wondering why the old photos weren’t in grue and bleen.)
And if you want more (how could you not?), another favorite of mine was Calvin’s “dark snowmen” series. Here.
November 2, 2009 – 11:14 pm
I must confess to being, along with several million of my fellow Gothamites, a tad distracted this evening; if you can’t guess why I’m not going to tell you.
So here’s a link, sent today by a reader, that those of you with an interest in matters military, and in our current predicament in Afghanistan, might find interesting: a publication called Schools for Strategy: Teaching Strategy for 21st Century Conflict, from the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army’s War College.
“General” seems an appropriate category for this one, I think.
October 31, 2009 – 9:15 pm
Not tonight, anyway. So make your way straight over to The Joy of Curmudgeonry, where our friend the estimable Deogolwulf has just published a formidable essay on the auto-genocide of the West.
Here.
October 30, 2009 – 10:02 am
On the front page of today’s Times there’s a photo from Pakistan: Hillary Clinton — the West’s most powerful diplomat, an inspiration to women everywhere, and an essential symbol and embodiment of Western liberty, strength, and confidence — in a Muslim headscarf. Again.
Oh well, at least it will be a few years before she feels the need to wear a burqa.
October 29, 2009 – 5:44 pm
Well, our theme for this week notwithstanding, this is certainly anything but “shameless filler”: Bill Vallicella, over at his website Maverick Philosopher, has presented some pithy excerpts from Michael Oakeshott’s essay On Being Conservative, in support of his thesis that conservatism is first a matter of temperament and inveterate disposition, and only thereafter a matter of philosophy.
Among the extracts Bill has selected is the following:
. . . what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.
[. . .]
And the office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensible. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.
Wise words. I had not read this essay in its entirety before; Bill’s post inspired me to do so. It is well worth your time. It appears, however, that the link to the original posted by Bill has gone bad; readers may instead find a PDF of Oakeshott’s essay here.
October 28, 2009 – 7:10 pm
Over at Der Spiegel Online is an interview with Charles Krauthammer, in which he assesses Barack Obama’s stewardship, to date, of our nation’s affairs. I find little to disagree with.
Here are some excerpts.
Read More »
October 27, 2009 – 10:53 pm
Heading wearily home on the subway late this evening, I skimmed an item in today’s Times — Waiter, There’s A Gavel In My Soup — in which the author Gay Talese described finding himself at the table next to Chief Justice John Roberts’s last Saturday evening at a cozy little Upper East Side restaurant. As Justice Roberts got up to go, he turned to Mr. Talese to ask if he would like the rest of a fine bottle of wine that the Chief Justice and his companion were not able to finish. Mr Talese gratefully accepted, and got Mr. Roberts to autograph the label as well.
I remarked to myself in passing that New York City is often more like a small town, but then, as I was turning the page, I noticed the name of the restaurant — Lumi — and realized with a bit of a jolt that the lovely Nina, her mother, and I had been there having dinner at the same time ourselves! We had failed to spot the Chief Justice, however, which I suppose is just as well.
Small town indeed.
I admit this is not much of a story, really, but as noted below it’s Shameless Filler Week. Anyway, you get what you pay for.
October 27, 2009 – 10:31 pm
With deadlines looming over me once again at work, I’m frazzled. It looks like it’s going to be another Shameless Filler Week here at waka waka waka.
Our Muse tonight is Terpsichore, as we present a video clip — sent our way by the lovely Nina — in which we meet Elvyna, a p’tite jeune fille who can really cut a rug.
October 26, 2009 – 9:53 pm
After eleven hours of heavy lifting at the office, I’m afraid the little grey cells have now called it a day, and a meaty post is simply not in the cards. But readers will know by now that having nothing of any interest whatsoever to say rarely keeps me from posting — and tonight is no exception.
This evening’s offering fits with particular aptness into our “tomfoolery” taxon, having been tossed over the transom today by my old Hung Gar training brother Tom Andrus. So, without further ado:
Can’t find the book you’re looking for? Well, it’s probably because you’re in the:
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October 26, 2009 – 12:09 am
It’s been a busy weekend, and I’ve had no time for writing. For tonight, then, a curiosity: the effect of visual contrast on gender recognition. Here.
October 23, 2009 – 10:48 pm
An item in today’s Physorg newsletter describes some remarkable neurological research: scientists at CalTech, by showing pictures to test subjects while monitoring brain activity, have managed to associate individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe with specific perceptions.
We read:
Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their experiment by showing the subjects images of people, places or objects that were familiar to them, including pictures of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Bill Clinton. They then looked for the neurons that fired when the subject was shown each image.
In each of the subjects they found individual neurons fired when the person looked at a specific image. So there was a “Michael Jackson neuron”, a “Marilyn Monroe neuron”, and others that fired when the person was shown an image of the Eiffel tower, a spider, or other familiar objects or places.
When the neurons corresponding to particular images had been identified, the researchers hooked the electrodes up to a computer that displayed the image corresponding to the neuron that fired. The subject was then asked to think about one of the images. So, for example, a subject was asked to think about Marilyn Monroe. The Marilyn Monroe neuron in the subject’s brain fired, and the information was relayed to the computer, which then displayed Monroe’s image.
Another experiment designed to test how well the subjects could control the single neurons was a fade experiment in which the subject was shown a combined image of two faces: Josh Brolin (star of Goonies) and Marilyn Monroe, and told to think of Josh Brolin. The electrodes sent data on the Josh Brolin and Marilyn Monroe neurons to the computer, which brightened the image of the one causing most neuron firing. As the subject thought of Brolin, the image of Monroe faded out.
This is an impressive result, with enormously important implications.
Next questions: if I have a neuron in my brain that reliably activates when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe, does it really fire only when I see or think of Marilyn Monroe? I’ll be surprised if neural resources are allocated in such a “dedicated” way — a one-to-one mapping of the kind suggested here, with each neuron representing exactly one intentional referent, and doing nothing else; it seems so limiting. I’ve always imagined that the hardware implementation of our memory and intentionality would take the form of configurations of groups of neurons; it seems you’d get more for less that way. And is this “Marilyn” cell activated if I see a picture of Marilyn Monroe without being conscious of it? How about if I dream about her?
And then the much harder question: why that neuron?
Read the story here.
October 23, 2009 – 6:48 pm
Life is hard, but at least it’s short.
October 21, 2009 – 1:02 pm
Over at CNN today we learn that the Coalition of Reason, an association of godless heathens, has purchased some advertising space in Gotham’s subway system. Their ads will point out the plain empirical fact that it is possible for people to be good without religion.
What’s telling about this is not the story itself, but that the story — interest group buys advertising — was considered newsworthy in the first place. After all, nobody batted an eyelash when Pastor Ock Soo Park ran an ad suggesting that we should all forsake our faculties of reason and join the Bible Crusade.
I’ve suggested before that if religion is, as I believe, an evolutionary adaptation that improves the relative fitness of human groups, then atheism — its truth-value notwithstanding — may be maladaptive. This ad campaign’s making the news might be seen as an example of the social organism’s immune system at work.
Read the story here.
October 21, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Over at Mangan’s today, Dennis reports on pressure being applied to the journal Medical Hypotheses (and its editor Bruce Charlton) in an attempt to suppress a controversial paper on AIDS. Here.
October 21, 2009 – 12:06 am
The model of the modern mind, it seems, is one that can attend to many things at once, effortlessly picking up new tasks as completed ones are dropped. This new-and-improved kind of mind features an agile attention that is almost entirely without inertia, dancing nimbly upon flickering streams of incoming data without fatigue or failure.
My mind isn’t like that. I can only think effectively about one thing at a time, and furthermore I don’t think I’m really all that different from anybody else. I’ve always thought that people who pride themselves on their “multitasking” are actually operating at a rather superficial and mediocre level.
According to an article published a few weeks ago in the Times, it turns out I’m right. Learn more here.
October 19, 2009 – 10:57 pm
Time travel is a persistently tantalizing idea, and has been a recurring theme in literature and other cultural media since at least as far back as the Mahabarata. Today it lives at the very edge of scientific plausibility: never entirely ruled out, but subject to persuasive objections. One of the most problematic is the “grandfather paradox”, which asks what would happen if you were to go back in time and kill your own grandfather in his boyhood. He would, then, never have grown to adulthood, and would never have become a father — which means, of course, that you would never have existed. But then you wouldn’t be able to go back in time to do the dastardly deed in the first place! There seems no way out of the loop, and to many that means that time travel itself must be forbidden by the fundamental order of Nature. But this objection doesn’t cover ordinary, non-murderous tourism; perhaps it is simply in some way impossible to perform actions that disrupt the continuity of the time-stream. Or perhaps our consciousness can travel in some purely observational way that lacks causative power; after all, to physicists the very “flow” of time itself appears to be just some sort of illusion presented to our consciousness. (In relativistic physics time doesn’t “move”; it is, in a sense, all there at once: just one of the axes in the space-time framework.)
Stephen Hawking asked: if we were to become able in the future to learn how to travel to the past, where are all the tourists? Shouldn’t we see them here now? But perhaps they are hiding, or simply aren’t visiting, or perhaps they can only travel back to regions of time that lie after some point in the future where we learn to make suitable cosmological arrangements. And of course there have been various allegations of actual time travel; perhaps the most curious and interesting one, though almost certainly a hoax, is the strange story of “John Titor”, which you can read about here.
But lately the idea has been popping up again, and in rarefied circles. Some physicists, noting the oddly unproductive history of super-high-energy particle colliders — first the startling de-funding of the Superconducting Supercollider here in America (an “anti-miracle”, in one scientist’s words), and then the suprising breakdowns at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — have suggested, and apparently seriously so, that operating these devices above a certain energy threshold may lead to such horrifying calamities that some sort of causal agency has actually reached backward in time to prevent them from getting up and running.
Learn more here.
October 18, 2009 – 6:19 pm
We’ve been off the air for a couple of days, having holed up in Wellfleet for a long weekend.
The weekend after Columbus Day is when the town hosts its annual Oysterfest, a two-day celebration of our renowned local mollusc. As you can see from the schedule of events, there are concerts, lectures, exhibitions and competitions (including a lively oyster-shucking contest and the annual Spelling Bee); there are also dozens of booths set up along Main Street where local artists and craftsmen hawk their wares, and where local charities do lucrative sheep-shearing. First and foremost, though, there is food, and above all there are Wellfleet oysters everywhere, plucked fresh from their briny slumber in our scenic harbor and served up in every way imaginable.
Read More »
October 15, 2009 – 11:20 pm
We’ve been traveling all evening, so just a brief item for tonight: a giant, glowing ribbon at the outer limits of our solar system. Here.
October 14, 2009 – 11:08 pm
We certainly have plenty of things to worry about already, I think most of you would would agree. To name just a few, we have an ancient clash of civilizations, with hot wars on two fronts and fanatical terrorists scheming in every shadowy corner of the globe; paranoid despots, who hate us, armed with nuclear weapons; a deeply polarized society here at home; a ravaged economy that, despite recent appearances, is likely to get far worse before it gets much better; the melting away of European society as it wallows forward under the deadly spell of doctrinaire socialist multiculturalism; the accelerating coarsening and trivialization of our own culture here in America; swine flu; earthquakes, floods, typhoons and tsunamis; unmapped asteroids that can wipe us out at a stroke; the Democratic Party; depleted fisheries; rainforest destruction; a floating island of garbage the size of Texas; the various religions of the world and their vexatiously incompatible fantasies; the Republican Party; global overpopulation, poverty and ignorance; AIDS; mass extinctions, increasing power and influence on the part of China and Russia; drug wars on our southern border and the erosion of free speech to our north; the end of the Maya calendar in 2012; the New York State Legislature; and of course the ever-present threat of a possible reappearance, without any warning, of Janet Jackson’s nipple.
So, given all this, you’re probably saying to yourself that the last thing we need is giant blobs of floating sea mucus. But here they are.
October 13, 2009 – 4:20 pm
A friend at work just sent this awkward logo my way…
October 13, 2009 – 10:31 am
National Geographic recently added a new feature to its website: a zoomable map du jour. I particularly enjoyed today’s offering, depicting 50 years of space exploration. Here.
October 12, 2009 – 6:37 pm
Here, with a hat tip to Dymphna at Gates of Vienna, are some video clips that should be of interest to all: Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant testifying before the Canadian Parliament’s Justice and Human Rights Committee, as part of an inquiry into the inquisitorial powers of the Canadian Human Rights Commission regarding censorship of “hate speech”.
This is where the West is headed, if we aren’t careful.
October 12, 2009 – 3:53 pm
Lovely. It won’t happen here, of course.
October 11, 2009 – 4:29 pm
A commenter on our recent post about President Obama’s Nobel Prize disapproved of my saying that Mr. Obama had made, in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world, “fawning salaams and obeisances before Islam”. At the time of the speech I had refrained from dwelling on this, preferring instead to compliment Mr. Obama on an earnest attempt simply to get everyone to simmer down a bit, but the fact is that the speech (in contrast to the one I suggested he ought to make) was indeed larded with false and fulsome praise for a religion whose orthodox adherents are the principal threat to peace in the world today.
I had begun to assemble some point-by-point remarks, but as it turns out the Norwegian essayist who goes by the nom de plume “Fjordman” has already done a nice job of it here; go and have a look.
Read More »
October 9, 2009 – 10:35 am
Continuing his ascent toward globe-girdling Godhead, Barack Obama has now been given the Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize is already little more than a political and cultural absurdity, a rubber-stamp of leftist adulation — but this award, in which the Nobel Committee shows all the dignity and sober judgment of a bunch of teenage girls at a Jonas Brothers concert, is remarkable even by the usual tendentious standards. What, exactly, has Mr. Obama — whose nomination, by the way, was submitted when he had been in office for about two weeks — done? Aside from making fawning salaams and obeisances before Islam in Cairo, and apologizing to all at every opportunity for America’s central role as creator and sustainer of all the world’s ills, his only accomplishments to date have been the extraction of tentative support from Russia for nuclear sanctions against Iran, and a handful of vague and hopeful speeches about a better tomorrow.
There was a time when the Prize was, at least, given for achievements, not aspirations. But I suppose we shouldn’t be too hard on the Nobel Committee: to their credit, they refrained from awarding Mr. Obama top honors in all the other categories as well.
October 8, 2009 – 11:15 pm
When we enumerate those few qualities that, despite Man’s infinite capacity for folly and cruelty, reveal nevertheless a transcendent spark that sets us apart from the beasts, chief among them, perhaps, is our astonishing ability at times to create, even as we groan upon the rack, works of art of timeless and ennobling beauty. We think of the music of Bach and Beethoven; the plays of Shakespeare; the paintings and sculpture of Leonardo and Michelangelo; the novels of Tolstoy; the great cathedrals of Europe.
Or, if that stuff doesn’t do it for you, there’s this:
For Nuit Blanche 2009, The Apology Project will be staged in its largest scale thus far. A cluster of 55 people wearing large brown paper bags on their bodies will congest a public hallway and personally apologize to every person who ventures through them. The uncanniness of this human blockade will disrupt the regular flow of traffic and provoke reflection about passive aggressive behavior. Who are these people? Why are they here? Why are they wearing brown paper bags over their bodies? There is an enigma about what precisely they are sorry for and why they are choosing to continue doing something that they find reproachable. If it is their awkward presence in the space that they are apologizing for, why do they chose to remain there? Why not just stop an offensive behavior rather than continue to indulge in it and apologize?
Encountering something like this moves me to such depths of emotion that I am simply unable to find words to do it justice. Read all about it here. And for an aesthetic experience of incomparable import and ineffably poignant beauty, be sure to visit the artist’s hompepage, here.
October 7, 2009 – 4:40 pm
If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time wondering why Saturn’s moon Iapetus is dark on one side. Well, here’s your answer.
October 6, 2009 – 11:28 pm
President Obama is grappling with a momentous and extremely difficult choice in Afghanistan. It is a grim situation, and there are really no good options; there is also no consensus amongst his advisers, or the punditry at large, about what we ought to do. Reader JK, who always has his ear to the ground, has sent us a link to a brief article by Henry Kissinger in which the former Secretary of State — who, however you may feel about him, is certainly an experienced hand — examines the problem.
Read More »
October 5, 2009 – 10:18 pm
With thanks to my colleague Eugene Dushlin for sending this my way, here’s a delightful video clip featuring some very nimble guitar-playing.
October 5, 2009 – 12:46 pm
According to the New York Times, the city’s Education Department has now banned bake sales. Here.
October 5, 2009 – 12:02 am
Over at Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella cites, with apparent approbation, an essay by the atheist author Julian Baggini that criticizes the agenda of “New Atheism”, exemplified by the “Four Horsemen” Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, as misbegotten and counterproductive. What Bill does not link to is a piquant response, at the same website, by the Canadian philosopher George Williamson.
Read More »
October 2, 2009 – 1:46 pm
I see that Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics has been rejected. Lord knows why President Obama thought it was appropriate to the dignity of his august office to go, hat in hand, to Copenhagen to petition the IOC on behalf of his hometown; his failure to carry the day is now an embarrassment he, and we, could well have done without.
P.S. While we’re at it, can anybody explain to me why on Earth they (whoever it is that’s in charge of such things) decided to light up the Empire State Building in red and gold last night to honor 60 years of Communist rule in China??
October 1, 2009 – 11:42 pm
With talent like this, how can America lose? (Hat tip to Matt Pierson.)
October 1, 2009 – 11:24 pm
Anybody who had the patience to wade through yesterday’s far too long-winded post (do forgive me for having such a low-rent editorial staff) knows that I have religion on my mind lately. In that post I mentioned, as I have often done in the past, the magnificent defensive arsenal of highly evolved religions. I ran across a splendid example in the subway today — a poster carrying the following message:
“Even though you may know the Bible, spiritual life is hard because Satan deceives you into accepting your thoughts. Living life with God becomes easy when you forsake what you know for the Word. Discover the secrets of true spiritual life at the Bible Crusade.”
-Pastor Ock Soo Park
Wow! That, I have to say, is getting things right out in the open, and no shilly-shallying. You have “thoughts”? And you were going to accept them? Man, that was close; you’re reading this poster just in time. Do you “know” things? Yikes! Forsake them at once. All that stuff — knowledge, thoughts, or anything else that enters your mind that didn’t come from Pastor Ock Soo Park — comes from Satan. And you know that’s true, because you have Pastor Ock Soo Park’s word for it, rather than anything you might “think” about it yourself, which comes from Satan, as we just explained.
Got it?
October 1, 2009 – 1:00 am
In the paper the other day there was an item about Pope Benedict’s recent remarks to the people of the Czech Republic. The Pope, speaking to one of the most secular societies on Earth, sought earnestly to persuade them of the dangers of a society without God.
On a superficial level this is easy enough to understand; after all, Benedict is the CEO of a huge, multinational business that has been losing market share at an accelerating pace in recent years. We’ve seen a lot of this sort of thing lately: I recall, for example, the CEO of General Motors admonishing Congress not too long ago about the dangers of a society without Chevy Camaros.
But this is a special case, of course: the Catholic Church has been in business even longer than Ford, GM, and Chrysler put together. More than that, though, the Church markets a product that has, for twenty centuries, inspired some of the fiercest brand loyalty in all of merchandising. Which is, really, the point.
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September 29, 2009 – 11:19 pm
It is with the profoundest sorrow that I must mark the death of Grandmaster William J. Chung, who was my kung-fu master for many years. He had been suffering from cancer, and collapsed at his home in New Jersey a few days ago. Attempts to revive him failed.
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September 28, 2009 – 9:37 pm
There was an amusing anecdote in my family about my long-departed Scottish grandmother, who, in the course of helping to potty-train one of her grandchildren (indeed I think it might have been yours truly), attempted to stimulate the “wee bairn” by running the water in the sink. The plan, however, immediately backfired, and she ended up having rather suddenly to usurp the throne herself, amid gales of laughter from those present.
This story popped into my mind this evening, and made me wonder: just how did we acquire that response to the sound of running water, anyway? As a good Darwinian, I have to imagine it is likely to have been in some way adaptive, but how did such an adaptation arise?
A guess: perhaps the masking effect of the sound provided an opportunity for our ancestors to relieve themselves in stealth when they might otherwise have been overheard by a predator, or revealed themselves to prey.
Any thoughts, readers?
September 28, 2009 – 9:07 pm
A reader emailed me a link today, and asked: “Ought the government prosecute?”
The story in question is a distasteful one: apparently somebody set up a poll on Facebook that asked the question “Should Obama be killed?”
According to the linked item, there were three options: “Yes“, “No“, and “Maybe, if he cuts my health care“.
This is, of course, reprehensible and utterly unfunny — and probably very stupid, as I imagine the Secret Service will be making things mighty hot for the idiot who thought this would be nothing more than an amusing prank. They take threats against the President very, very seriously, as they should. The political and racial climate is terribly tense at the moment, and the Secret Service are surely on edge.
So: ought the government prosecute? The answer to that depends on another question: is what this jackass did illegal? I don’t know the answer to that, but I have a feeling it might be, or at least close enough to give it a go. With my blessing. He certainly didn’t do the loyal opposition any favors.
Have we lost all decency?
No need to answer, it’s a silly question.
September 27, 2009 – 11:32 pm
We’ve been hearing a lot lately about how stupendously ignorant most Americans are about science: one in five Americans thinks the sun revolves around the Earth, for example, and almost half of us believe the Earth itself is less than 10,000 years old. But utter benightedness about basic science isn’t nearly enough, as it turns out — we are Americans, after all, and it won’t do simply to be massively ignorant about one or two subjects. As in everything else, we are determined to lead the world in empty-headedness too, it seems, and where better to start than by knowing absolutely nothing at all about America itself?
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September 27, 2009 – 9:40 pm
I was startled a few hours ago to hear that the grand-daddy of political “pundits”, William Safire, whose outstandingly informative columns on politics and the use of language educated, persuaded and entertained so many of us for so long, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79. I didn’t even know he was ill, and I am awfully sad to learn that he is gone.
His Times obituary is here.
September 24, 2009 – 5:47 pm
I’m off to a concert tonight, and traveling tomorrow, so I may not have much time for blogging over the next couple of days. For tonight, then, here’s an engaging biographical sketch, from Tuesday’s New York Times of one of my favorite scientists: astronomer Dr. Carolyn Porco, who is best known for her long association with the unmanned probes that have been exploring our solar system for the past few decades.
Also, don’t miss the stunning new images of Saturn that her Cassini team have been making available, here. And while we’re at it, here’s Dr. Porco giving a talk at the TED conference a couple of years ago.
September 23, 2009 – 11:53 pm
I speak up for Western society often, and consider its defense important, but I have to wonder sometimes if it’s really worth it anymore. There may indeed be barbarians at the gate, but the accelerating putrescence of our popular culture reminds me daily that we have an ample store of them right here at home.
A few days ago, the dilapidated former actress MacKenzie Phillips caused a galvanic frisson of anticipation throughout the land when she remarked that she would shortly be disgorging, on the Oprah Winfrey television program, some dank and titillating secret. It has now been revealed: Ms. Phillips has graciously chosen to share with a breathless nation the news that she was for many years the sexual plaything of her father, John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas.
This important story is, of course, front-page, breaking, blockbuster news, of vital interest to all Americans, and you can be sure that when the interview aired today its target audience, in their millions, watched with rapt attention and satisfying, visceral engagement, just as they might a chicken-wing-eating contest, or a public hanging. I guess the notion that any civilized person might wish to keep such a hideously, repugnantly distasteful thing as private as possible — as I am sure any member of my dear mother’s generation would have taken the utmost pains to do — must nowadays seem amusingly, touchingly quaint.
It would be nice if there were a decent middle ground somewhere between this and this, but I suppose I’m asking too much.