It is Saturday evening now, and at last I have the time to begin to respond to all this brouhaha about immigration and race. Tomorrow looks like a very quiet day, and I should have ample time to compose a proper reply.
The problem tonight is that my Internet access has been on the fritz all day; it is working at dial-up speeds right now, but will probably conk out again any minute. If the trouble persists I will post from the office on Monday.
So exhausted. Even complete sentences, subject-verb agreement is quite beyond me. Sleep first. Back tomorrow.
OK, waka wakans, I can use a hand here. I am once again working till at least midnight, and have no time for a post. But I would like it if you would visit this thread at Dennis Mangan’s, where I am alone under heavy fire, and have no time to respond. Go forth, and comment away; the topic is complex and important. But I warn you: think before you post. Be rigorous, be coherent, be consistent. Show ’em what we’ve got.
I’m working late tonight (still at the office at 10:30), and have no time for writing. But as always I hate to send you away empty-handed, so I have a little tidbit that ought to give you one more thing to worry about. Have a look here.
After I posted this morning’s item, I watched the inauguration, along with the rest of the world. It is unquestionably a promising and historic moment, and I am not immune to President Obama’s charismatic appeal myself — but I have to say, at the risk of being a cranky old grouch, that I found the love-fest in the National Mall rather disturbing. I’m leery of large crowds, particularly when they are sharing a powerful emotion.
Looking back over my 52 years, I must say I cannot recall anything like the giddy euphoria attending today’s inauguration. Perhaps the mood was something like this in January of 1961, but if so I was too young to remember, and anyway I doubt it. Certainly I don’t remember pilgrims descending on Washington in their millions to touch the hem of Jimmy Carter’s garment, or even Ronald Reagan’s.
Software engineers often imagine that Google must be just the best place to work. A couple of years ago I visited a friend who works in their New York office (which then was in Times Square), and I have to say it looked pretty good: a beautiful, modern office with all sorts of worker-friendly touches: huge monitors on everyone’s desk, lavishly appointed lounges, a free cafeteria, and so on. The company is obviously a mighty engine of creativity, and developers are even given one day a week just to tinker with ideas of their own. It is also notoriously hard to get hired there; the candidate must run a long and arduous gauntlet of interviews and examinations. As you might expect, it isn’t easy to land The Best Job In The World.
But according to some former employees, Google isn’t quite the Shangri-La it’s cracked up to be. Have a look here.
The US has deliberately done nothing much to deal with the problem of piracy in the waters off the Horn of Africa; the idea was that this would instill a sense of urgency in other nations that had more at stake. One problem has been that nobody knew what to be done with pirates if caught; there is no local government capable of the job. All this may be changing. The Navy has announced the creation of a new body, CTF-151 (CTF stands for Combined Task Force), that will be a coalition fleet of vessels from several “interested” nations. Furthermore it appears that the State Department has reached an agreement with a nearby nation to serve as the venue in which captured pirates will be tried (there is no way to be sure, but it appears it might be Kenya). It looks like this may all get going soon after the inauguration on Tuesday.
If you are interested in this sort of thing, you should read this briefing on the subject by Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command, U.S. 5TH Fleet, Vice Adm. William Gortney, given on January 15th. And as always with matters naval, go to Information Dissemination for analysis.
In last night’s post we linked to a reminiscence about the late Patrick McGoohan. That essay, in turn, linked to another blog with a post about Mr. McGoohan, this time by a film writer by the name of Glenn Kenney. Mr. Kenny’s post is a good one, and if you were a McGoohan fan you should read it. But what raised my eyebrow was a comment left by one of Mr. Kenny’s readers.
We remarked with sadness the other day upon the death of actor Patrick McGoohan, star of the 1960s TV series Danger Man, Secret Agent, and The Prisoner. Our old friend David Pauley wrote in today with a link to this thoughtful essay about McGoohan’s icy appeal.
There is a fascinating item making the rounds today. It seems that mysterious noise in an exquisitely sensitive gravity-wave detector may in fact be an indication that our instruments are now sensitive enough to detect the granularity of spacetime itself — and the argument is a very interesting one.
The last time physicists announced that an inexplicable noise in a sensitive detector was evidence that something funny was going on was when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were trying to build a quiet microwave antenna, back in 1964; it turned out they had stumbled on the remnant black-body radiation of the Big Bang. So probably we ought to pay attention.
We must note with sadness the death of Patrick McGoohan, who was, I always thought, just about the coolest guy I ever saw on TV.
Thanks to the kind and generous efforts of my friend Bob Wyman over at Google, Jeffrey Hodges’ blog, The Gypsy Scholar, is on the air once again. Go pay a visit.
Many thanks, Bob.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Ethiopians, who have been fighting Islamists in Somalia, have given up.
What next for Israel? Thomas Friedman, writing in today’s Times, suggests that Hamas will be chastened by the fury of Israel’s assault, as, he says, Hezbollah was after the battle of 2006.
We’ve been hearing for years how dangerous it is to talk on cell phones while driving, and many states have made doing so illegal. While I can easily see how distracting it can be to fumble with the device itself behind the wheel, I’ve always thought that merely talking on a cell phone, particularly a hands-free version, should be no more distracting than having a conversation with a passenger. Apparently I was wrong, according to this article in today’s New York Times.
You may have heard of a man by the name of Christopher Langan. I first learned of him a few years back, when he was profiled on some television show or other. He has, apparently, one of the highest IQs ever measured; it is said to be somewhere in the vicinity of 200. He has had, however, rather a different life than one might have expected: after a boyhood in Montana in which he suffered with a brutally abusive stepfather and a rural educational system that had no idea what to do with him, he drifted through various jobs and ended up as a bouncer in a Long Island bar.
Here’s another item from the Wall Street Journal’s Op-Ed page: a look at the rapidly consolidating dictatorship of the grotesque Venezuelan despot Hugo ChÁ¡vez.
A week ago the author and military historian Max Boot published in the Wall Street Journal an insightful, if morose, essay on the difficulty Israel faces in the situation in Gaza. I neglected to link to it at the time, but it has lost none of its currency and relevance. I reproduce it below in its entirety.
The appointment of Dawn Johnsen as head of the incoming Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel got my attention when it was announced yesterday; Ms. Johnsen is well-known as a critic of the Bush administration’s efforts to strengthen the power of the Executive Branch.
An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal argues that with the nation at war she is not, perhaps, the wisest choice. Many will disagree.
The tension here is between the nation’s ability to wage war effectively — which calls for a good measure of secrecy about one’s strategy and tactics, and the ability to respond flexibly to rapidly changing situations unhampered by debate and second-guessing — and the transparency and checks on executive power that are necessary for a free and democratic nation. Those concerned about the latter will argue that dictators often begin their consolidation of power by invoking national defense, while those focused on the former will argue that to insist on legislative, or even judicial, scrutiny and approval of every executive decision during a time of external conflict undermines the nation’s ability to defend itself, and to defeat its enemies.
Read the article here.
We’ll get back to weightier matters before long, but the demands of the workplace press heavily just now, and there will be scant time over the next few days for serious posts.
Tonight, though, I have an interesting little item for you natural-history buffs.
Our little community here at waka waka waka is deeply concerned about the sudden disappearance of our friend Horace Jeffery Hodges’ outstanding website, The Gypsy Scholar. According to Blogspot his site “has been removed”, but anyone who knows Jeffery know that he would never close down his blog — at which he has written daily posts for years now — without announcing his intention to his readers.
Jeffery writes from Seoul, South Korea, where he is a professor of English. He writes often about the local culture, and although he is always the very model of tact and civility, it may be that some of his opinions have irked the university he works for, or even the government (Koreans are apparently rather prickly about such things).
Jeffery, if you are reading this, we all hope that this is just a temporary technical problem, soon to be repaired, and that you and Sun-ae and the kids are all fine.
From reader JK, who never wearies of sending our way nourishing morsels he has plucked from the Web, comes this intriguing item: a new cosmic mystery.
In addition to the Question Of The Year we mentioned in a recent post, the latest from Edge.org also incudes an interesting essay by the prominent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran on the physiological underpinnings of the self.
Here’s an encouraging and heartwarming item from across the pond, courtesy of Gates Of Vienna.
New York City is a crowded, chaotic place. The public transit is bad and getting worse, and the weather is, generally, awful. Housing is cramped and expensive. The Mets and Jets collapse, like clockwork, year after year. But there are times when I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
This evening the lovely Nina and I joined the Tuesday-night crowd at Avery Fisher Hall, where the Philharmonic, under the guidance of maestro Lorin Maazel, treated us to a splendid and eclectic program.
I have said often in these pages that it seems likely that the human propensity for religion is a cognitive adaptation that has flourished because it tends to improve the cohesion of social groups, thereby increasing the fitness of those groups in competition against others. As David Sloan Wilson argues in his book Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, this idea of “group-level selection”, though out of favor among Darwinian theorists for many years, is now becoming repectable again, and is an appropriate place in which to look for adaptive explanations of various sorts of social behavior.
We are traveling today, so will likely be off the air until tomorrow. Please browse our archives, try the “Random Post” link at right, or join the ongoing conversation about the situation in Gaza. (Or all three.)
Charles Krauthammer, in today’s column, responds to those who see Israel as being at fault for bullying the Palestinians once again. His essay begins:
Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.
Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis — 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years — deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.
This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage — or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb — will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.
For Hamas, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. The religion of Jew-murder and self-martyrdom is ubiquitous.
The storm ended late last night, and as the clouds broke up the temperature fell sharply, down into the low teens. Today was sunny, but it was very windy, with a high of only about twenty degrees. This afternoon at about two-thirty or three I went back out to take some more pictures.
We are up in Wellfleet for the holiday, and were treated to a winter nor’easter that took the form of an impressive blizzard. It began at about ten this morning, and before long the roads were covered, the wind was blowing hard, and the visibility was down almost to zero. I got into my reliable all-wheel-drive vehicle at about one o’clock, and went out for a spin, camera in hand. Here’s a side of this popular seaside getaway that the throngs who crowd the place in August will never see.
Over the transom today comes another item from our friend Jess Kaplan, mentioning yet another eccentric Russian academic. This time around it is a mathematician by the name of Anatoly Fomenko.
Our friend Jess Kaplan has sent us a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal informing us that according to a prominent Russian political analyst, the U.S. is about to fall apart.
The debate continues at Mangan’s; the issue is whether one can genuinely be interested in conserving the virtues of Western society while at the same time publicly questioning the truth of the central claims of Christianity. The Christians in the conversation would, unsurprisingly, like us to agree that Western civilization is essentially and inextricably bound up with Christianity, and that therefore no “true conservative” should go around suggesting that its beliefs are false. Meanwhile others of us, including Dennis, our host, feel that although Christianity has of course been the dominant religion of the West thoughout most of its long history, the cultural and philosophical core of the West is not in itself distinctly Christian.
I’ve just got my hands on something I’ve been looking for, off and on, for a couple of years now: a bottle of Dogfish Head 120 Minute India Pale Ale.
In a comment to a recent post, reader Greg Estren raised a question that has been implicit here for quite some time. Should we encourage religious belief, even if we think religion’s claims are false? We asked this same question, regarding the notion of objective moral truths, back in September: are these beliefs genuinely necessary in order for us to lead worthwhile lives, or are they, as Daniel Dennett has suggested, more like Dumbo’s magic feather — a helpful fiction that helps us learn to fly, but which we can let go of once our skills have matured?
Our pal Kevin Kim, in a recent post, linked to a video clip featuring Carl Sagan’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” monologue. On Valentine’s Day of 1991, at Sagan’s request, the spacecraft Voyager 1 was turned toward the Earth to capture an image of its faraway home. The doughty little doohickey was, by then, about four billion miles away, and in the photo (which you can see here), the Earth appears as nothing more than, well, a pale blue dot. Sagan, who during his too-short life created a body of work that should stand as case-closing evidence that atheists can nevertheless have a deeply reverential sense of the numinous, used this photo to illustrate, in poignantly poetic terms, how small we really are, and how fragile and precious the beauty of our remarkable little world.
To all of you, with heartfelt appreciation and warmest wishes.
(Yes, I appreciate the ironic juxtaposition of this and the previous post, but even we Godless heathens can enjoy this winter holiday. We had it first, anyway.)
If you have gone to look at the post and comment thread about Christianity over at Dennis Mangan’s, you will have seen that Dennis, an unbeliever who considers himself a conservative, must confront the assertion put to him by Lawrence Auster: that it is simply not consistent to be both a conservative defender of Western civilization and to disdain the Christian religion.
It would be easy enough, and correct, simply to say it all just depends on how one defines “conservative”, but that is uninteresting, and ignores a legitimate charge. If, as is surely the case, Western culture owes many of its essential qualities to its Christian heritage, then if one wants to repudiate Christianity, one must give some account of exactly what it is, then, that one expects to conserve. If our culture has Christian bones, argue the believers, you can hardly fillet it and expect it to stand.
Have a look at the picture below. Whom would you say is in charge?
From number 136, in the Krailsheimer edition:
Sometime, when I set to thinking about the various activities of men, the dangers and troubles which they face at Court, or in war, giving rise to so many quarrels and passions, daring and often wicked enterprises and so on, I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
Pascal saw in Man’s constant need for diversion our terror of the abyss of wretchedness we must confront if we are brave enough to look within ourselves. In this he was exactly right.
Man has not changed: the wretchedness is real enough, and the diversion more cacaphonous than ever. What can be done? For Pascal, the answer lay in God. But is God as real as the wretchedness? If not we need another approach.
If only H. L. Mencken were with us today. We do have some gratifyingly caustic talents currently in harness, but when Mencken was feeling the warp-spasm he was incomparable. I have no doubt that Christopher Hitchens would go dry for a year just to have lunch with the man.
What Mencken would have to say about recent political and economic events will have to wait until we meet on the far bank of the river, but the acerbic conservative writer John Derbyshire has recently excerpted a pungent morsel that might give us some idea. Taken from the Chrestomathy, the passage imagines the hatching of the New Deal by Harry Hopkins and his chums:
Four preposterous nonentities, all of them professional uplifters, returning from a junket at the taxpayer’s expense, sit in a smoking car munching peanuts and talking shop. Their sole business in life is spending other people’s money. In the past they have always had to put in four-fifths of their time cadging it, but now the New Deal has admitted them to the vast vaults of the public treasury, and just beyond the public treasury, shackled in a gigantic lemon-squeezer worked by steam, groans the taxpayer.
If you cup your hand to your ear, you can hear them stoking the boiler.
The thread has lengthened over at Dennis Mangan’s since I linked to his recent post about religion, and again I urge you all to go and read it. He has been engaged primarily with the conservative writer Lawrence Auster, who has been defending his Christianity against Mr. Mangan’s skeptical atheism. No, that is wrong: Mr. Auster is on the attack, and Dennis is demonstrating, with masterful skill and saintly patience, that religious arguments against the nonbeliever — and Mr. Auster mounts the assault as well as any I’ve ever seen — break harmlessly upon a rational, skeptical worldview. It is a lot to read, but very much worth your time.
Sorry about the blank page yesterday; I expended what fuel I had in the comment thread of this recent post. It might be worthwhile to sum up a little later in a new one, and to promote some remarks made in that discussion to the front page, but today is a busy day. Meanwhile, then, here is a tart offering, garnished with a savory and piquant comment, from our friend the estimable Deogolwulf.
A couple of years ago we mentioned the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2,100-year-old clockwork device that was recovered in 1902 from a Mediterranean shipwreck. The gizmo has baffled the boffins since the day it was found, as it represents a level of engineering expertise that nobody would have imagined to have existed in 80 B.C. (and which was not seen again until the 1700’s). It stands defiantly alone, its provenance a great and frustrating enigma.
The Mechanism has been subjected to intense scrutiny in recent years, using the latest imaging technology (of the sort that has not, so far, been found in any ancient shipwrecks), and now an English engineer has built a fully operational replica. Have a look here.
You should all drop in on Dennis Mangan, who has been having a conversation about God. It seems his views are nearly, if perhaps not entirely, congruent with my own.
Reader Court Merrigan, in a comment to last night’s post about New York State’s proposed “obesity tax”, quite rightly calls me on the carpet for likening the Paterson administration’s plan to the public-health policies of the Nazis. As he suggests, I ought to be able to make my case without resorting to such analogies — the point being that the Nazis represent such enormity of evil, such a moral black hole, that any argument or simile that comes within their event horizon is simply dragged down out of existence. Making comparisons to them is worse than useless: in terms of perfidy the Nazis are seen as not just enormous, but infinite, rendering any comparison with any scurrilousness before or since absurd, and utterly discrediting any argument that attempts to do so. He’s absolutely right: it was ugly and counterproductive, and I should have thought better of it.
So to David Paterson and his staff (and to any of you who thought my remarks were offensive and uncalled-for): I sincerely apologize. You are not Nazis, and I lowered myself by invoking their name to criticize your proposal — which was presumably well-intentioned, however frightening.
I do not apologize, however, for likening the proposed policy to Fascism, because it is exactly this sort of thing that is Fascism’s hallmark.
Somalia, probably the most dangerous place on Earth, is in the news again. The UN Security Council today voted unanimously to adopt a US proposal to take “all necessary measures” to bring piracy under control. Our insider sources tell us that it appears that arrangements are already being made for land operations as well as naval action.
This is a complex situation: Somali pirates, as the folks at Information Dissemination have pointed out, cause far more discomfort to our international rivals, and in particular our Islamist enemies (who are, meanwhile, on the move themselves in the region), than to U.S. interests. Keep your eye on this; it may be about to get interesting.