Many years ago, the historian, philosopher, and author Will Durant asked an assortment of his eminent contemporaries for their opinon of the meaning of life, and gathered the responses into a book, now rather obscure. It happens that I own a first-edition copy, and the other day I took it down from the shelf.
The first reply, which I have transcribed here in its entirety, is from H.L. Mencken. You are not likely to run across it anywhere else.
Mulla Nasrudin once undertook to take nine donkeys for delivery to a local farmer.
The man who entrusted them to him counted them, one by one, so that Nasrudin could be sure that there really were nine.
On the road his attention was distracted by something by the wayside.
Nasrudin, sitting astride one of the animals, counted them, again and again. He could make it only eight.
Panic-stricken, he jumped off, looked all over the place, and then counted them again. There were nine.
Then he noticed a remarkable thing. When he was sitting on donkey-back, he could see only eight donkeys. When, however, he dismounted, there were nine in full view.
“This is the penalty,” reflected the Mulla, “for riding, when I should, no doubt, be walking behind the donkeys.”
“Did you have any difficulty getting them here?” asked the farmer when Mulla Nasrudin arrived, dusty and disheveled.
“Not after I learned the trick of donkey-drivers — walk behind,” said Nasrudin. “Before that, they were full of tricks.”
From “The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin”, by Idries Shah
Religious fanatics have been spreading the love again. First we had Sunday’s murder of Dr. George Tiller by a paranoid Christian extremist — in the sanctuary of a Christian church, no less — and then, Monday morning, a lethal assault on an Army recruiting station by a Muslim zealot.
The latter item, in particular, bears watching, I think; I have a feeling there may be quite a bit more to the story of Mr. Abdulhakim Margahid Muhammad than we have heard so far. It is interesting also that the case seems to be getting far less coverage than I would have expected: I wonder if the timing is significant.
As has been the case for over thirteen centuries, East and West are still glowering darkly at one another across a deep cultural divide. One hopes always for harmony and rapprochement — themes that Mr. Obama will, I am sure, focus on in his upcoming speech from Cairo — and perhaps, in this small and brave new world, with the stakes so very high, the goal is not entirely out of reach, though it is hard to feel much optimism.
As the blind man said, “we shall see.”
So distracted am I, and so out of touch with the world of music just at the moment, that I didn’t know it until I read it in today’s Times: the incomparable Manny’s, midtown Manhattan’s Mecca of musical merchandise, has closed its doors.
This lavish emporium, set in “Music Row” on West 48th Street amongst the theaters and recording studios, was where everyone who was anyone went to buy everything. You never knew who you would see in there, but you were bound to see someone, and on the walls were thousands of signed photographs of the pantheon of music-biz luminaries who had passed through to shop and shmooze over the decades.
I know all things must pass (which, by the way, reminds me of the time I saw George Harrison in the shop, sometime back in the early Eighties), but this is awfully sad news.
You can read the Times article here, and take a little tour here.
In a brief item posted today, Bill Vallicella wonders:
Does it matter whether life has an ultimate meaning or not? Someone might be satisfied if he has a good chance of attaining middle-sized happiness: peaceful days, restful nights, an adequate supply of health and wealth, satisfying employment, a loving spouse, friends, progeny, long life, and the like. Why not rest our hopes in what is known to be possible rather than in what is not known to be possible, such as immortality, the resurrection of the body, the visio beata, entry into Nirvana? Why hanker for what is beyond our mortal scale? Why not accept the finite? Are we not just a particularly clever species of land mammal?
Indeed, we are finite, and we are mortal, as are all living creatures. The problem is that we, and we alone, are in the poignantly unfortunate position of knowing it. The unique gift that evolution has bestowed upon us allows us — nay, forces us — always to imagine the future, and we do it very well: so well, in fact, that we see very clearly that soon we will not be a part of it. Is it any wonder that, clever mammals that we are, we have found so many imaginative ways to make that gift shut the hell up, and will pay dearly for them?
Bill continues:
Death, as signalling radical and irreversible change, is the muse of philosophy. What Jack London in John Barleycorn called “The Noseless One” refutes myopic worldliness.
To one on his deathbed, this fleeting life, about to vanish, must appear empty and worthless, much ado about nothing, a vain struggling and jockeying for position in a parade going nowhere. But the possiblity of death is here right now for all of us, and this metaphysical insecurity demonstrates the impossibility of myopic world-immersion for one who sees clearly. One cannot be satisfied by a merely mundane meaning. Whether or not life has an ultimate meaning, one cannot live meaningfully except in quest of it.
Indeed, once the message becomes clear, it is difficult to sit comfortably, even if it appears we may fidget in vain. As the late John Updike’s Henry Bech reminds us: man is “a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust.”
The link in the previous post was taken from a comment thread in a blog-post called to our attention by reader JK. The post, from the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog, is an attempt to assess the import of North Korea’s recent nuclear test (if that is indeed what it was).
Here’s a handy item for you hobbyists out there: courtesy of the Federation of American Scientists, it’s the Nuclear Weapon Effects Calculator. Enjoy!
I’ve just got back from class, it’s almost eleven, and I haven’t the time or energy tonight to write the longish post I really want to be working on. So for this evening I’ll just leave you with a bit of froth from our friend and commenter “the one eyed man”: Old Jews Telling Jokes.
P.S. On a personal note: proud and heartfelt congratulations to my brilliant and beautiful daughter ChloÁ«, who was awarded her Master’s degree today. I’m kvelling.
The latest phase in the persecution of the brave Burmese dissident Daw Aung San Suu Kyi by Burma’s odious and repressive ruling junta is underway, and today testimony was given in this bizarre case by the American John Yettaw, who swam across a lake to reach Ms. Suu Kyi’s house on May 3rd, and spent the better part of a day there before swimming away. Ms. Suu Kyi is charged with violating the terms of her imprisonment by entertaining this uninvited guest.
Mr. Yettaw, a Mormon from Missouri, apparently claims that God sent him to protect Ms. Suu Kyi from an assassination plot that was revealed to him in a dream. It is hard to imagine that there isn’t a great deal more to this story than meets the eye, even beyond the obvious assumption that the brutes running the country set the whole thing up (in one of many odd details, apparently when the police spotted Mr. Yettaw in the lake, they didn’t shoot at him, but “threw stones”).
The most curious aspect of the whole thing, perhaps, is the very unusual name ‘Yettaw’, which, had you just shown it to me and asked me to guess its origin, I would have said was… Burmese.
You can read the news at CNN here, or take in an informative Wikipedia article here.
The Pakistani army’s new offensive against the Taliban has been underway for several weeks now, and it does appear that they have applied considerable heat. In today’s Wall Street Journal we find an article by Fouad Ajami in which the noted Mideast scholar weighs in on the struggle for the survival of the secular Pakistani state, and on America’s disconcertingly vague and diffident Pakistan policy. Here.
It appears that the California Supreme Court has decided to uphold the ban on same-sex marriages that the state’s voters passed in November. There would have been vociferous manifestations of outrage no matter how the decision might have gone — either from those who felt that an activist Court had overridden the expressed will of the people, or from those who feel that it isn’t the State’s business who marries whom, and that the ban violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am sure the latter group is sorely vexed by this ruling.
I certainly don’t mind if gay couples want to marry — it doesn’t gore any of my oxen, as far as I can make out, and I think it is rather mean-spirited to deny them participation in the custom — and I think it’s a pity that they couldn’t muster enough support amongst the voters to block the ban. But I don’t think an argument based on the Equal Protection Clause is compelling, as it is not the application of marriage laws equally to all married couples that is at issue, but the very definition of what a “married couple” is in the first place. This is, I think, the sort of thing that is better left to the voters than the courts.
Some years ago, anthropologist Donald Brown compiled a list of “Human Universals”: cultural traits that seem to be instantiated by all human societies. The list is broad, and contains almost all the things you’d expect to see: the collection includes belief in supernatural/religion, for example, as well as sucking wounds and language employed to misinform or mislead. Conspicuously absent, however, is one that I have long thought should be included in a truly comprehensive roster: the urge to make “Top Ten” lists.
Over at CNN we see that even zoological taxonomists are not immune to the pull of this this ubiquitous primordial drive: scratching the list-making itch, they have compiled for us their choice for “Top Ten New Species of 2009”. Have a look here.
We are still on vacation, but I did find some time for the blogosphere this evening. I spent it, though, reading and commenting on a fascinating thread about free will over at Bill Vallicella’s place.
Here.
From our friend Sarah Zimmerman comes a link to an article by Steven Van Zandt about just what it is that ails the music business.
Readers will know Steve as Bruce Springsteen’s long-time associate in the E Street Band, and as consigliere Silvio Dante from The Sopranos. I got to know Steven myself during the making of the Springsteen album The River at Power Station Studios, where I was a member of the engineering staff, and I later worked on some of his solo projects. He is an enormously thoughtful, passionate and articulate man, and in this essay he examines the etiolating effect on the music of the way records are, by and large, made these days: by solitary individuals working in little private rooms, without any of the social interaction and specialization of responibilities that were, he argues, essential to the process during the golden age of record-making. As much as appreciate the value of the tools that the digital revolution has given us, I think he’s right on target.
Read the article here.
We’re on vacation through Monday, and will likely not be writing much (though you never know). Please feel free to browse our extensive archives, or try the “View a Random Post” link at right.
From number 720, in the Krailsheimer edition:
Ethics and language are particular, but also universal, branches of knowledge.
In this illuminating insight the great Pascal anticipates moral philosophers and evolutionary biologists such as John Rawls and Marc Hauser by over 300 years. As homo sapiens we all share an innate moral faculty and finite ethical grammar, just as we do for language — but also like language, the particulars of its instantiation varies, within elastic limits, from culture to culture.
By way of Dennis Mangan, here is a review of the new hybrid car from Honda. It is less than favorable.
The government of Sri Lanka has announced that the leader of the “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam”, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed in the sanguinary denouement of that nation’s long civil war.
This news will certainly come as a great relief to a great many people in that tormented island. Mr. Prabhakaran was a ruthless terrorist who gave the world such blessings as the explosive vest and female suicide bombers, and who also masterminded the assassinations of Indian prime minister Rajiv Ghandi (who was killed by a young woman who detonated herself as she greeted Mr. Gandhi with flowers) and Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa.
It is said that when Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae, defeated the Persian king Cyrus in 529 B.C., she had him decapitated, and threw his head into a vessel full of his own blood. “You who have lived so long on the blood of others,” she said, “now you may drink your fill.”
It’s been a busy weekend — it often seems there is less free time on the weekends than during the week — so there has been little opportunity for brooding and writing.
For tonight, then, here’s a cheery little item about Google and you.
From commenter JK comes a link to a story about a young girl with juvenile diabetes who died because her parents, besotted by delusional religious fantasies, saw fit only to pray for her, rather than seek simple and effective medical treatment. We read:
Last Easter Sunday, 11-year-old Kara Neumann of Weston, Wisconsin, lay motionless on her bed, too weak to walk or speak. If her parents had called the hospital that day, Kara might have lived. Instead, Dale and Leilani””followers of the Unleavened Bread Ministry, an online church that shuns medical intervention””knelt in prayer beside her. Kara died a few hours later of diabetic ketoacidosis, a result of undiagnosed and untreated juvenile diabetes.
Her parents are now facing criminal charges, as they should. But according to this article, it seems the law is on their side:
“We are not commanded in scripture to send people to the doctor,” Unleavened Bread Ministries preacher David Eells said in a statement to his followers, “but to meet their needs through prayer and faith.” Under current Wisconsin law, his followers aren’t commanded by the state, either. Part of the legacy of the 1996 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which included a landmark exemption for parents who do not seek medical care for their children for religious purposes, is that parents cannot be accused of child abuse or negligent homicide if they genuinely believed that calling God, instead of a doctor, was the best option available.
This is not only insane, it is patently unfair. Why should this exemption — to be allowed to watch your innocent and helpless child die before your eyes of an easily curable disease as a direct result of your demented worldview — be granted only to the religious? What about crackpot inventors or dietary quacks, for example? If I’m allowed to withhold medical treatment in favor of prayers to Jesus, why not magnetic waves or plankton smoothies?
The larger question, of course, is what role the State should play in protecting children. Are our offspring are simply chattel until majority, for parents to deal with as they like? In what practical way is refusing medical treatment to gravely ill children any different from starving them to death? The result is the same.
Obviously the State does take an interest in defending children from abusive parents; indeed, if it gets around that you’ve been spanking them when they misbehave, you might soon find yourself in very hot water. But so convinced are we in this country of the overriding value and importance of religious belief — no matter how idiotic or destructive — that to condemn our children to death in the name of the Lord is simply our God-given right. This is America, after all.
You can read this unspeakably depressing story here.
In what may be an enormously important piece of scientific work, chemist John D. Sutherland of the University of Manchester has discovered a reaction path by which RNA nucleotides can have been assembled from molecules likely to have been present in the Earth’s early environment.
The Taliban, responding to Pakistan’s latest attempt to flush them out of Swat, has demanded that all government officials in the area must leave at once, or their families will be “arrested”. In today’s news we read that:
On Wednesday, [Taliban spokesman Muslim] Khan denied reports from many refugees emerging from the Swat Valley that Taliban militants had carried out a campaign of violence and intimidation in the region for the past two years.
Several terrified Swat residents, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Taliban, described how insurgents kidnapped and killed their critics, beheaded government informers and blew up girls’ schools.
Not at all, said Mr. Khan; they are only providing a benevolent public service:
“We are killing the people which are only no good for society, like thieves and people who are making problem for the poor people, like people who are working for army,” he said. “We are only killing these people.”
…and women who won’t wear the hijab, and people who listen to music, and girls who want to go to school, etc.
Read the latest here.
My old friend Dave Pauley, whose inbox is apparently as clogged as my own, has transmuted base metal into gold. Here is the result:
Spam Sonnet
Ascent your darling couch experience;
Go for the strong virility you need.
An MBA award to you convinced
Of greater power deep inside your seed.
Your stick will be harmonic with her hole,
Make sharp your arms in holy war above.
Your golden watch, it thinks you are too old,
So teach your organ ways to create love.
The money that it takes to live the dream
Will teach her what your epilepsy is:
More energetic feeling when you cream,
A longer distance shooting of your jiz.
With mortgage that is written out of jail,
More gorgeous women your thing will impale.
New words appear in our language almost every day. Sometimes, like a lovely wildflower or sturdy oak, they are welcome additions to the lexical landscape, delighting the rambler who encounters them for the first time. Some of these neologisms, however, produce an effect more like rounding a bend in the trail only to find a ruptured bag of garbage, or severed human foot. In a depressing item in today’s news, I have encountered just such a word: “weisure”.
This ghastly coinage describes a grim reality of modern life: the increasingly blurred line between work and leisure. The article’s author seems to see this as a sign of progress; I certainly do not. We read:
What happened? Why do Americans want to mix work and play? Well, first, there’s more work and less play, according to Conley’s book “Elsewhere, U.S.A.”
“For the first time in history now, the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely you’re going to have an extremely long workweek,” he says. These busier Americans often want to save time by taking care of business and pleasure simultaneously.
Ah, business and pleasure, simultaneously. What a blessing!
Indeed, why stop there? Readers are advised to be on the lookout for “wex”, “wefecation”, “wisease”, “wemotherapy”, and, if the wemotherapy doesn’t work out, perhaps even a stay in a “wospice”.
An item in the news today informs us that the celebrated and photogenic Catholic priest known as “Father Oprah” (whose actual name is — you just can’t make this stuff up — the Rev. Alberto Cutie) has admitted having had an affair of the flesh. This is always awkward for Catholic clergymen, and has put Father Cutie in a bit of a cleft stick. We read:
The priest said he believes in celibacy but thinks it should be optional. He said he had never had a sexual relationship with anyone other than the woman since leaving the seminary 15 years ago.
“I don’t support the breaking of the celibacy promise,” Cutie said. “I understand fully that this is wrong.
“I don’t want to be the anti-celibacy priest. I think that’s unfortunate,” he said. “I think it’s a debate that’s going on in our society, and now I’ve become kind of a poster boy for it. But I don’t want to be that. I believe that celibacy is good, and that it’s a good commitment to God. This is something I’ve struggled with. And something that I never expected to become a public debate.
There will of course be the usual jeering about hypocrisy, but before flinging any tomatoes of their own, readers might like to have a look at philosopher William Vallicella’s insightful musings on the subject. Here.
Over at CNN today we learn that a Saudi judge has ruled that it makes perfectly good sense, when wives spend more than they ought to on the accoutrements of their oppression, for their husbands to slap them around a bit. We read:
Arab News, a Saudi English-language daily newspaper based in Riyadh, reported that Judge Hamad Al-Razine said that “if a person gives SR 1,200 [$320] to his wife and she spends 900 riyals [$240] to purchase an abaya [the black cover that women in Saudi Arabia must wear] from a brand shop and if her husband slaps her on the face as a reaction to her action, she deserves that punishment.”
This is all God’s will, of course; it’s really quite simple, and laid out very clearly in the Koran. If you still have any questions, perhaps this explanatory video will help.
We note that President Obama is planning an address to the Muslim world, to be given from Cairo on the fourth of June. I wonder what he will say. Probably it will be the usual bromides about respect, with reassurances that we still regard the the virulent form the religion has taken in a great many minds, and the global epidemic of jihadism it has led to, as some sort of glitch: a minor, if vexatious bug in the otherwise universally benevolent Muslim software.
Here’s what he won’t be saying, most likely:
At CNN this morning we find Oprah Winfrey interviewing a Dr. Daniel Pink, who, in his book A Whole New Mind, suggests that linear, rational, “left-brain” thinking is hopelessly passé, and that those who wish to prosper in the brave new world of the 21st century had better get their right brains off the couch.
I quite appreciate the value of the sort of holistic, fuzzy-wuzzy, creative, Big-Picture cogitation the right hemisphere is said to specialize in, but I do hope that in his book Dr. Pink offers a rigorous and coherent logical argument to buttress his case. It’s not enough, for example, just to imagine a beautiful, glittering bridge, spanning a mighty river gleaming gold in the promising light of sunrise, that will allow people to come together in an ever-widening circle of love and harmony — I’d also like to make sure that it doesn’t collapse an hour after they cut the ribbon, and would hold off on retiring all the engineers just yet.
There is increasing chatter these days about legalizing marijuana use; If Oprah and Dr. Pink are as eager as they say to wean the nation off its left-brain addiction, that might be the fastest way to go. And if you really want to get an idea what the right side of your brain does, watch this remarkable video by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor.
The dazed and tottering government of Pakistan, humiliated by its attempt to appease the Taliban in Swat, is now making a conspicuous display of indignation. It has nullified the pigeonhearted agreement it signed with the vile jihadists, and has instructed the army to head back up there and have another go.
They will no doubt push the Taliban out of certain areas, along with hordes of wretched civilians, but whether they will hold what they take from their ruthless, adaptive, and highly mobile foes, or whether they have the stomach for this fight generally, is another matter. Collusion with the Taliban is reported to be common, and there appears to be a general reluctance on the part of Pakistan’s fighting men to kill fellow Muslims for the sake of a secular, post-colonial nation-state.
We will see how this goes.
Perhaps the most important question of all is: what is the most important question of all?
Our friend G. Orcalimbo Jones, during the course of his radio show last Friday, tipped off his listeners to a marvelous Internet resource: a compendious archive of live recordings from the glory days of the old Fillmore and the King Biscuit Flower Hour. It’s called Wolfgang’s Vault, and you can find it here.
There was a brief item in the Times today about a court ruling against one James Corbett, a California schoolteacher who, it was ruled, violated the Establishment Clause by dismissing creationism in class as “religious, superstitious nonsense”. This offended the sensibilities of a student of his, Chad Farnan, who sought legal remedy, and got it from judge James Selna, of the U. S. District Court, Central District of California.
I wonder what sort of precedent this will be. While creationism may or may not be, depending on your definition of the word, superstitious religious nonsense, it certainly qualifies as religious nonsense, and it is a pity that a schoolteacher, whose job it is to educate our children, can’t say so.
According to the article, prior decisions have interpreted the Establishment Clause as “prohibiting government employees from displaying religious hostility.” It does seem that Mr. Corbett had some (understandable) difficulty concealing his scorn for this bizarrely persistent mind-virus, and I wonder whether the ruling would have been the same if he had simply explained, in a matter-of-fact way, that creationism is an incorrect account of the history of life. If Mr. Corbett, who is a history teacher, just launched into an insulting screed apropos of nothing, I suppose the kid might have a case (and it seems he did).
But I wonder also if there is, in principle, any limitation on this view of religious protection. If a major religion made comparably daffy claims in other areas — if it were to insist that George Washington was Japanese, for instance, or that an iron bar will float in chicken soup, or that the sun rises each day in Ronkonkoma and sets in Easton, PA — would they have to be “respected” in this way too?
In an update to yesterday’s story, CNN is now reporting that the hapless Samantha Orobator will not face the death penalty after all, because she is pregnant. She became pregnant while in custody, which for a 20-year-old British woman facing capital charges in a Laotian prison probably does not mean that she fell in love and wanted to start a family. One would have to imagine that someone raped her, and it is grimly ironic that he may have saved her life by doing so.
CNN is reporting a troubling story from Laos, where a 20-year-old British woman is facing possible execution by firing squad. She is charged with drug trafficking, and is alleged to have been caught in possession of heroin at Wattay airport:
Samantha Orobator “is facing death by firing squad for drug trafficking,” said Clare Algar, executive director of Reprieve, a London-based human rights group.
Orobator, 20, was arrested on August 5, said Khenthong Nuanthasing, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman.
She was alleged to have been carrying just over half a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of heroin, Reprieve lawyer Anna Morris told CNN by phone from Vientiane, the Laotian capital. “For that amount of heroin the sentence is normally the death penalty,” she said.
Apparently Ms. Orobator has also become pregnant while in custody; one suspects that this is, perhaps, not voluntary family planning.
It’s hard to know what to say about this sad story. If the charges are accurate, then Ms. Orobator’s foolishness in attempting such a thing seems almost Darwinian in scale, though good judgment at age 20 is exceedingly rare. One has to imagine, though, given the venue and circumstances, that there is probably much more to the story (women are often victims of various forms of deceit or coercion in such cases). In any event, execution certainly seems cruelly harsh.
One particularly disturbing aspect of this item is that American readers apparently still need to be told that a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds.
Today’s news carries a story about the motion picture industry’s seemingly intractable difficulties with illegal file-sharing. This is the same affliction that brought down the record business (and forced your humble correspondent to abdicate his career as a big-shot recording engineer and get a real job), although for the movie industry it is perhaps even more worrisome, as the cost of high-end movie-making has always been higher than that of record-making — more so now, perhaps, than ever.
A lot of clever people have tried to solve this problem, but so far without success; the real problem is that these industries have gone from producing easily protected physical objects (LPs, reels of film) to producing weightless and infinitely fungible packets of information. The only hope (and it is a faint and most likely futile one) lies not with technological advances, but moral and social change — as expressed, in the item linked above, by the director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America, one John Malcolm:
If a person is a true movie lover, they will want to respect the art, the artists and the countless people behind the scenes who make the magic happen, Malcolm said.
And no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge. I used to be one of the people who “make the magic happen” myself; now I’m writing code for a living. If this forlorn hope is what the industry is counting on, they’d better brace for impact.
The news has been chock-full of exciting and interesting items lately. Today we learn that Harvard researchers, after careful study of video clips of Snowball the Cockatoo, have concluded that we humans are not the only species capable of rhythmic movement. (Indeed, this precious gift does not even extend to all members of our own species, as anyone will know who has ever listened to a roomful of white people clapping along with the band.)
This all might have been obvious, I should have thought, after a moment’s reflection upon the many rhythmic patterns and complexities of birdsong, but the boffins must be more thorough than we laypersons, I suppose. At any rate, it appears the blessing of natural rhythm is shared by “14 types of parrot species and one elephant”. (I am not sure what a “type of species” is, but that must be a very proud elephant, and the envy of his chums.)
The story also informs us that one “Alex, an African grey parrot”, particularly enjoys dancing to drum tracks, but this veers, I think, dangerously close to invidious stereotyping, and we won’t dwell on it.
You can see Snowball cutting a rug (well, the back of a chair, actually) here, and read the story here.
It seems the pork industry is not at all pleased with the term “swine flu”. I agree it is hardly a mellifluous name, but their objection is more practical than aesthetic; apparently they are concerned that it is depressing their market, even though you won’t catch the disease from eating pork. Given how poorly informed most people are about most things, they’re probably right.
We had already learned that two other groups who rarely see eye to eye about anything — Jews and Muslims — also dislike the name; they both have an skittish aversion to pigs, which they consider unclean and are forbidden to eat. (That nobody anywhere has suggested that swine flu is in fact clean, or should be eaten, least of all by them, doesn’t seem to matter; they simply don’t want to hear any talk at all of matters porcine, or be reminded that there even are such things as pigs, it seems.)
According to this news item, the pork-packers, giving up on educating the public as to the undiminished safety and nutritiousness of their scrumptious product, are taking another tack: they are trying to convince us that the term is actually a misnomer, and that this new flu has nothing to do with pigs at all:
“This flu is being called something that it isn’t, and it’s hurting our entire industry,” said Dave Warner, communications director for the National Pork Producers Council. “It is not a ‘swine’ flu, and people need to stop calling it that … they’re ruining people’s lives.”
This is audacious nonsense, of course: pigs are indeed a vector for this form of influenza, just as birds were for the “avian flu” a little while back — but you have to admire the industry’s feisty attitude, and that they are not about to be bullied around by mere facts. I expect they are actually well aware that the name is not just a capricious inaccuracy, and has a sturdy connection to the truth of the matter, but, as Mark Twain said, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
As several commenters have suggested, it’s time we had a “Name That Flu” contest. The pork producers have already offered an alternative:
Minnesota is the nation’s third-largest pig farming state, and its health experts said Wednesday they would be calling the illness “H1N1 novel flu” going forward.
” ‘Swine flu’ gives a connotation that really it shouldn’t have, and makes people wonder about eating pork,” said Minnesota Health Commissioner Dr. Sanne Magnan.
The European Union has followed suit.
“In order not to have a negative effect on our industry, especially under this crisis situation, we decided to call it ‘novel flu’ from now on,” said Androulla Vassiliou, the European commissioner for health.
The “novel flu”? That won’t do at all: the publishing industry is already up in arms about it.
Any ideas?
We note that women in Kenya have decided to exert political pressure on a fractious and argumentative coalition government by organizing a nationwide sex strike.
The “soft power” of women is often overlooked in the political and strategic calculation of powerful men, but as I have mentioned elsewhere, if properly organized, a Ghandi-style female satyagraha could be, I think, one of the world’s most effective armaments against fundamentalist oppression.
Read the story here.
An item in the news today inquires as to the secret of a happy marriage. Well, I’ve been happily married since 1982, and have some thoughts on the subject.
A married couple are like two moving parts that must operate together, in constant contact, as a working machine. Unlike manufactured parts, however, they are somewhat irregularly shaped, and when they are brought together there is, inevitably, friction.
This can have two outcomes: either the parts are so mismatched as to be incompatible, interact destructively, and the apparatus flies apart, or, over time, the continuous engagement of the two parts smooths away the irregularites, and the machine settles into harmonious and productive operation.
The less friction, the better chance that the parts will manage, over time, gradually to reshape themselves to one another. How then, to provide the necessary lubrication? If there is a single piece of advice I’d give married couples, it is this: choose your battles.
There will always be disagreements: about home, money, travel, friends, food, entertainment, recreation, and a thousand other things. If you want your marriage to last, identify, sincerely and frugally, those things that really, really matter to you — the essential things that you would never be able to give up, or change about yourself, without deep and lingering resentment — and stand up for them. If you can do this honestly, in a spirit of love and generosity, the list will be short. Your spouse’s will be too. This list is also different for each of us, so no one-size-fits-all advice column can tell you what it contains. You have to figure it out for yourself, and it isn’t always easy.
For everything else, give way lovingly, cheerfully, and entirely without anger. You’ve already decided that these are the things that don’t really matter; they are certainly worth nowhere near as much as the happiness of a solid and loving marriage.
This is rather a big deal: Senator Arlen Specter has crossed the aisle, and is now a Democrat. This leaves the foundering GOP with its decks even more conspicuously awash, and gives the ruling party the 60-seat, unfilibusterable majority they have been struggling to gain. I hope they use it wisely.
For those of us “of a certain age”, this swine flu outbreak (which is all over the news just now: see here, here, and here) is something of a madeleine, awakening memories that carry us all the way back to 1976, and the brief and forgettable presidency of Gerald R. Ford.
It was a strange and dreary time, the middle 1970’s: after the paroxysms and upheavals of the 60’s, and the agonies of Vietnam and Watergate, the nation was spent. The economy, enervated by “stagflation”, gasped for air; the major cities lay crime-ridden and bankrupt; and a rudderless popular culture drifted from fad to mindless fad, with the fashion industry, evidently relieved of all fealty to beauty, good taste, or even fundamental human dignity, creating monstrosities that still, even three decades later, evoke a frisson of horror. Ahead lay Son of Sam, the Hee Haw Honeys, and disco.
At the helm was Mr. Ford, a placid draft-horse of a man, who probably lives on in most people’s memories wearing a “Whip Inflation Now” button and bumping his head on something. In 1976, with an election looming and a wish, no doubt, to demonstrate dynamic leadership, he seized upon the death from influenza of a young Army man at Fort Dix as an occasion for decisive action. Mr. Ford, announcing an impending Swine Flu epidemic on the scale of the Black Death, began an aggressive, and enormously costly, national vaccination campaign. To his credit, the epidemic never materialized, but more than a few people seemed to die from the inoculations themselves. In the end the whole affair was judged, perhaps unfairly, to have been a colossal fiasco, and in November the nation showed Mr. Ford the door, preferring instead to order up four years of Jimmy Carter.
You can read the whole story here.
According to today’s news, it appears Objectivism’s star is ascending lately, with sales of Ayn Rand’s books up sharply. Readers taking an interest in Randian thought should visit The Maverick Philosopher, where Dr. William Vallicella has for some time now been conducting a searching examination of Rand and her followers. Note also this post over at Mangan’s, in which we learn that Objectivists are not always so objective.
For those of you who have never clicked on the “why waka waka?” link on our sidebar, this site takes its name not from Pac-Man or Fozzie Bear, but from the lyrics to the song Coffin For Head Of State, by the great Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti. Here’s a clip of the song. If you’d like to know more (and learn the song’s sad story) click the link.
Today’s conversation piece at CNN is this comical item, in which an Idaho man seeks a pigeon credulous enough to pay U.S currency for an approximately hand-shaped arrangement of rocks. According to the vendor, one Paul Grayhek, what makes this such a desirable item is that it is a calling-card left in his Coeur d’Alene backyard by none other than God Almighty Himself. (It looks like a rather unexceptional basaltic “trap-rock” formation to me, but what do I know.)
The beauty part, as far as Mr. Grayhek is concerned, is that any prospective buyer (and even taking into consideration the target demographic, it is staggering to imagine that such a dim little fish is indeed swimming around out there somewhere, waiting to be hooked) will not be allowed to cart off the Hand Of God, but must be content to take ownership in situ. We read:
The buyer will “basically be buying the rights, complete and exclusive rights” to the rock, including literary and movie rights, according to Grayhek.
Literary and movie rights! Get me Nicholas Cage’s agent.
According to this item at CNN, the Pakistani government is reporting that the Taliban have completely withdrawn from their recent conquests in the Buner province near Islamabad. This is absurd, of course, as no advancing army would willingly abandon territory they have won except as a tactical feint, and given that Pakistan has seen fit so far only to send a ragtag band of poorly trained men to confront the insurgency in Buner, such a move would make no sense.
It seems, rather, that they have simply established control, garrisoned the area with local sympathists, and withdrawn their mobile fighters so as to coalesce their masse de manoeuvre for actions elsewhere, in keeping with a strategy of general disruption. We read:
A Pakistani government official said Friday that the insurgents had completely withdrawn from the district by the end of the week, but a human rights group said people in Buner were reporting that local Taliban remained in the district.
And senior U.S. officials cautioned that any withdrawal by the Taliban was likely meaningless and that the fundamentalist group now holds large areas of the country with the government seemingly unable to stop them.
“We’re certainly moving closer to the tipping point,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said on NBC’s “Today” show Friday.
Indeed we are. I am, frankly, surprised how little attention this is getting; it is by far the direst crisis unfolding in the world right now. In the next few days and weeks it is going to get worse, not better, and despite what Fareed Zakaria says, it is very difficult to see just who is going to stop them from getting their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Even if the media still, for the most part, see this as a below-the-fold item, you can be certain that the military do not, and I’m guessing that things are getting very busy in Afghanistan right about now.
All very distracting, of course, right when we need it the least. Almost as distracting as last summer’s Olympics, in fact: interested observers might want to keep an eye on the Caucasus.
In today’s Times is an article about who should be directing the plays of August Wilson. Apparently Mr. Wilson, whose plays chronicled the lives of black people in America, felt that only black directors should be in charge of productions of his work. We read:
In life, the playwright August Wilson had an all-but-official rule: No white directors for major productions of his work, which was one reason that a film was never made from his 10 plays about African-American life in the 20th century. “Fences,’ one of the two awarded the Pulitzer Prize, foundered in Hollywood because of his insistence on a black director.
Yet in the years since Wilson died in 2005, an increasing number of white directors have staged his plays, and last week came a milestone: “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,’ which opened on April 16, is the first Broadway revival of a Wilson play since his death and the first ever on Broadway with a white director, the Tony Award-winning Bartlett Sher.
The selection of Mr. Sher by the producer, Lincoln Center Theater, has prompted concern and even outrage among some black directors, who say this production represents a lost opportunity for a black director, for whom few opportunities exist on Broadway or at major regional theaters.
I quite understand why Mr. Wilson would have felt the way he did, and am inclined to agree that he ought to have his way. I do want to ask, though: does this acknowledgment of the plainly evident natural fact that race is a trait-group that can still matter to people mean that there is ever, also, a legitimate place for “outrage” when the colors are reversed?
As a PC user and programmer, I’ve had to listen for many years now to hipper-than-thou Mac users telling me how their favorite machines are simply better. Sure, Macs are beautifully designed, with a pleasing integration of hardware and software. But they are also more expensive, and there is a great deal of software for which Mac versions simply don’t exist.
But what really singes my drawers is when Mac users start telling me about how much safer they are. These Bohemian sorts imagine, in their technical naiveté, that this is due to the edgy, creative cleverness of the system’s design, when in fact it is simply because hackers haven’t bothered to focus their energies on a system that is run by only a small percentage of computer users, and an even tinier — utterly negligible, really — percentage of businesses. Apple, with their irritating “PC vs. Mac” commercials, have been nibbling away at this market, but have so far done so while staying, for the most part, under the hackers’ radar.
So it is not without a small, and I hope, forgivable, measure of Schadenfreude that I read this news item, about a new piece of malicious “botnet” software that explicitly targets Macs.
Welcome to the big time, kids.
The situation in Pakistan, which we commented on yesterday, continues to deteriorate, and appears to be creating broader alarm. Today Fareed Zakaria, interviewed by CNN, gave a grim assessment:
CNN: Beyond their proximity to the capital, what makes this such a dire situation?
Zakaria: Well, I read that the spokesman for the Taliban told The Associated Press this week that the Taliban would protect Osama bin Laden if he, or any of his brethren, wanted to come into the Swat Valley. The doomsday scenario here is the militants take power in Pakistan, get control of the estimated 100 nuclear warheads that the country currently has and share their new “toys” with al Qaeda. That is highly, highly unlikely, but what is possible is spiraling chaos in the country, which would create more “badlands” in which terror cells can operate more freely.
Mr. Zakaria says that the nuclear scenario he adumbrates is “highly, highly unlikely”. I’m not nearly so confident, and I suspect he isn’t either.
What should be done?