January 13, 2009 – 12:26 am
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.
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January 12, 2009 – 12:21 pm
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.
January 11, 2009 – 6:08 pm
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.
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January 10, 2009 – 12:37 pm
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.
January 9, 2009 – 11:52 pm
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.
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January 8, 2009 – 2:03 pm
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.
January 8, 2009 – 11:31 am
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.
January 7, 2009 – 10:55 pm
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.
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January 7, 2009 – 4:55 pm
January 7, 2009 – 12:00 am
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.
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January 5, 2009 – 11:26 pm
Every year the website Edge.org poses a provocative question to some of the world’s brightest bulbs. The 2009 question is out.
Drumroll, please:
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January 4, 2009 – 11:20 pm
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.
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January 3, 2009 – 1:02 pm
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.)
January 2, 2009 – 6:05 pm
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.
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January 2, 2009 – 12:39 am
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.
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December 31, 2008 – 7:24 pm
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.
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December 30, 2008 – 10:43 pm
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.
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December 29, 2008 – 1:58 pm
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.
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December 28, 2008 – 10:52 pm
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.
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December 27, 2008 – 11:25 pm
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.
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December 26, 2008 – 11:42 pm
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?
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December 26, 2008 – 12:32 am
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.
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December 24, 2008 – 5:34 pm
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.)
December 24, 2008 – 12:10 am
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.
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December 23, 2008 – 6:06 pm
Democracy is best for the unexceptional man.
December 23, 2008 – 10:36 am
Have a look at the picture below. Whom would you say is in charge?
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December 22, 2008 – 11:43 pm
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.
December 21, 2008 – 9:19 pm
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.
December 21, 2008 – 6:10 pm
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.
December 20, 2008 – 12:22 pm
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.
December 18, 2008 – 6:32 pm
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.
December 18, 2008 – 12:00 am
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.
December 17, 2008 – 10:59 am
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.
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December 16, 2008 – 11:33 pm
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.
December 16, 2008 – 10:46 pm
New York’s economy is in big trouble. The state has an enormous budget gap to close, and toward that end the Paterson administration has proposed a measure that is such an egregious miscarriage of governance, as well as being so audaciously stupid, that I can hardly find appropriate language with which to disrespect it.
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December 15, 2008 – 11:54 pm
Dividing my time, as I do, between New York City and Wellfleet, MA, I hang with a pretty liberal crowd. In social settings, if the conversation gets round to politics, human nature, economics, religious pluralism, or a number of other topics, it’s pretty much given that at some point I am going to be glared at, often by several pairs of eyes at once. I know the look all too well, by now, and it is not pretty. It betokens not intellectual disagreement, but stern moral judgment — the kind of look a Taliban cleric might give Amy Winehouse.
I stay calm, and I think I do a pretty good job of defending my corner, but once these “red-diaper babies” imprint you as a conservative, they suddenly lose the ability to descry any philosophical daylight between you and Rick Santorum.
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December 15, 2008 – 10:36 pm
Number 113, in the Krailsheimer edition:
It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it.
This is excellent, though Pascal, a man of his time and culture, sees himself and the universe as distinct. But in us the universe has simply put forth a part of itself: a mirror in which it can behold itself upon awakening.
December 15, 2008 – 1:59 pm
Having trouble getting in the Christmas spirit? With yet another hat tip to our reader ‘JK’, here’s a story that has it all: solid religious content, a prophet in the wilderness, and, if the story’s true, an impressive display of lights.
December 15, 2008 – 12:17 am
From this evening’s Borowitz Report:
Yankees Sign Iraqi Hurler
Shoe-throwing Right-hander Impresses Scouts
In their latest bid to beef up their pitching rotation for the 2009 season, the New York Yankees today signed Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi to a three-year deal worth $32 million.
The right-handed al-Zeidi, 28, impressed the Yankee scouts with his performance in Baghdad yesterday when he threw both of his shoes at President George W. Bush.
While neither of the shoes hit their target, both throws “had great velocity and good movement,” said Yankee owner Hank Steinbrenner.
“The first shoe was high and outside but the second one was right down the middle,” Mr. Steinbrenner said.
The Yankee boss said that he was also impressed with Mr. al-Zeidi’s fighting spirit when Secret Service agents tackled him.
“That could come in handy when we have a series with Boston,” he said.
December 14, 2008 – 2:21 pm
Making the rounds at my office last week was a video clip about the exponential pace of technological change. To the accompaniment of an urgent techno-pop soundtrack, in an onimous minor key, it presents a series of factoids illustrating the implosion of accustomed time-frames, giving the viewer the impression that the acceleration of technological, social, and economic evolution is now so great that we are hurtling into an unforeseeable future faster than we can possibly hope to adapt. The tone of the video is tawdry and sensationalist, but the impression is, I think, correct.
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December 13, 2008 – 1:00 pm
We are back in Wellfleet for the next few days, having driven up here after work yesterday. We arrived at about one a.m., under a startlingly brilliant full moon, with an icy wind shaking the pines and bare oaks.
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December 11, 2008 – 11:24 am
With yet another hat tip to our friend JK, who has been tirelessly throwing odds and ends over the fence, here is an item that falls squarely in the “odds” category (though I suppose it involves “ends” as well).
December 10, 2008 – 11:33 pm
My insider sources tell me there is an “uptick” in the “chatter” lately; this is their way of saying that the murmurous rustle of nefarious voices has got louder, or more insistent, or something, and that it seems more likely than usual that some horrible and murderous attack might be imminent.
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December 9, 2008 – 9:29 pm
Here’s an item I meant to mention a few days ago. Published on December 5th, the 75th anniversary of Prohibition’s repeal, it is an eloquent call for an end to our nation’s misguided war on drugs. While our neighbor to the south sinks into violent anarchy, and the Taliban enriches itself producing opium, we continue to fight a puritanical, unwinnable and immeasurably costly crusade against a natural human appetite, and fill our prisons with an arbitrarily created criminal class — when all the while we could be reaping enormous fortunes in taxes and tarriffs, and depriving civilization’s foes of a virtually limitless source of income.
I lean to the right on some issues, but not this one. With the recent shift of fortunes in Washington, perhaps we can finally get something done about this insane policy.
I realize that people have strong, and divergent, opinions on this issue. Your thoughts?
December 8, 2008 – 10:45 pm
Number 47, in the Krailsheimer edition:
Justice and truth are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly. If they do make contact, they blunt the point and press all round on the false rather than the true.
December 8, 2008 – 10:35 am
In commenting on a recent post, our reader and commenter Addofio, parsing the distinction between truth and opinion, says that “it all depends on what we mean by ‘true'”. Kevin Kim takes a good preliminary poke at the question over at his place.
Or, as my friend Anthony Bouza once explained it, in closing a commencement address:
Beauty is Truth,
and Truth is Beauty;
Rooty-toot-toot
and-a-rooty-toot-tooty.
As Addofio says, it all depends.
December 7, 2008 – 10:20 pm
Something new for our sidebar, courtesy of our friend David Duff: Sister Wolf.
December 7, 2008 – 8:41 pm
Reader JK, who has his ear to the ground at all times, alerts us to some worrisome news. Apparently the prevalence in the environment of certain chemical pollutants has reached such high levels that a broad assortment of vertebrate species are producing increasingly “feminized” males.
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December 6, 2008 – 9:18 pm
There was a news item a day or two ago about some advertising put up in several cities by an association of Godless heathens. The ads suggested that folks should reconsider their belief in a supernatural deity; one went so far as to make the direct assertion that there is no God at all. The ads have aroused considerable indignation, it seems, which I suppose shouldn’t be terribly surprising, given the strength and durability of the social shield that protects religion from criticism.
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December 5, 2008 – 11:27 pm
Any one who has paid any attention to neuroscience in the past few decades knew of the sad, strange case of “H.M.”, who, as a young man in 1953, underwent brain surgery to control persistent seizures. The operation did indeed quiet the storm inside his skull, but a terrible cost: the surgeon had removed part of his hippocampus, and so the patient lost the ability to form new memories.
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