November 17, 2008 – 12:24 am
With a hat tip to our friend Jess Kaplan, here is P.J. O’Rourke’s wistful assessment of the wreckage of American conservatism.
November 15, 2008 – 10:04 pm
I recently began a careful re-reading of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, a book I had not looked at closely in decades. The work is primarily an argument for Pascal’s Jansenist Christian beliefs, but prepares the soil with a searching review of Man’s transience and wretchedness.
The genius Pascal, in his cruelly foreshortened life, acquired wisdom far beyond his meager allotment of years, and the collection is a treasury of coruscating aphoristic gems. I think I will post some of them here from time to time, with or without comment; I’ll present them as numbered in the 1966 Penguin translation by A.J. Krailsheimer.
Here, for example, is #26, which seems timely enough:
The power of kings is founded on the reason and folly of the people, but especially on their folly. The greatest and most important thing in the world is founded on weakness. This is a remarkably sure foundation, for nothing it surer than that the people will be weak. Anything founded on sound reason is very ill-founded, like respect for wisdom.
November 15, 2008 – 9:00 pm
Well, seven, now; I should have penned this post back in August, when the title was most apt.
But there are definitely strange things afoot in British Columbia: story here.
November 13, 2008 – 10:09 pm
I managed to get home from work by eight-fifteen this evening, which, in the context of the past week, feels like playing hooky. The little grey cells, however, are in weary and mutinous disarray, so I will probably be leaning on the “Shameless Filler” category for another few days.
But I do want to direct you to an excellent essay that reader and commenter David Duff sent our way in a previous thread. It is from Kenneth Anderson’s “Law of War and Just War Theory” blog, a website that describes itself as follows:
Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at Washington College of Law, American University, Washington DC, and a research fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, blogs on topics related to international laws of war, international law, related human rights topics, international NGOs, and the theory of the just war. (Everything here is first draft and subject to changing my mind.)
In this post Mr. Anderson takes up the subject of the role of intellectual elites in government: a topic that has been on everyone’s mind lately, provoked in large part by the sudden and freakish ascent to international prominence of the flamboyantly uncultured, proudly ignorant, but curiously gifted Governor of Alaska.
Read More »
November 13, 2008 – 10:04 pm
This from today’s Borowitz Report:
November 13, 2008
Bush in Race against Time to Wreck Country
Legacy of Destruction at Stake
Confounding the conventional wisdom that he is a lame duck president with no agenda as his days in office dwindle, President George W. Bush is redoubling his efforts to mutilate the country before his term expires, aides confirmed today.
“President Bush has spent the first seven years and ten months of his presidency doing everything in his power to leave the United States in smoldering ruins,” said White House spokesperson Dana Perino. “He certainly is not going to let the final days of his tenure go to waste.”
While Ms. Perino said that President Bush is proud to have led the U.S. into a “pointless and totally avoidable catastrophe in Iraq” and “the most terrifying financial cataclysm since the Great Depression,” he is “in no way prepared to rest on his laurels.”
Mr. Bush is “delighted,” Ms. Perino said, that the stock market has lost one trillion dollars of its value in the last three days, but “that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the damage he hopes to wreak in his remaining time in office.”
Among the targets for destruction that the President is currently eyeing, Ms. Perino indicated that the demise of the Big Three automakers was at the top of his list.
“If the President could preside over the disappearance of the Big Three and the millions of jobs they represent, that would be the ultimate feather in his cap,” she said.
For his part, Mr. Bush took few questions from reporters today, saying that he had to return to the Oval Office to order random airstrikes over Belgium.
November 13, 2008 – 10:02 pm
If you think your IPhone can do it all, you ain’t, as they say, seen nuthin’ yet. Have a look here.
November 12, 2008 – 11:50 pm
At my age, I certainly don’t enjoy working fourteen-hour days, and right through the weekend — I had quite enough of that in my long years at the recording console (and have the receding hairline and sunken eyes to prove it). But that’s just what I’ve been doing: I have a deadline to meet, and, to make matters worse, I set myself back several days by making some boneheaded design errors in the code I’ve been working on. The folks I work for are remarkably pleasant, understanding, and gracious — quite inexplicably so, under the circumstances — but a deadline is a deadline, and my comfortable paychecks come with the fair and reasonable expectation that when the time comes to deliver the goods, said goods will indeed be delivered, and in good working order besides.
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November 10, 2008 – 9:50 pm
Work presses heavily upon me just now, leaving little time for anything else. Please feel free to wander about the archives, or try our new “Random Post” feature. Things should be back to normal in a day or two.
November 8, 2008 – 7:20 pm
Last night we had friends over for dinner, a lovely couple we know from Wellfleet. They are both academics: she is a sociologist and associate professor at Harvard.
Naturally we were discussing the recently transformed political landscape, and the conversation turned to Mr. Obama’s possible choices for the composition of his cabinet. Among the names that came up was that of Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who may serve in that role again in the new administration. He was also the president of Harvard University from 2001 until 2006, when he resigned after some remarks he made sparked a feverish social and political brouhaha.
At the mention of his name, our guests immediately expressed harsh disapproval. I replied that I had never understood what was so troubling about Dr. Summers’ comments, and a lively debate ensued.
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November 7, 2008 – 12:31 am
I note with sorrow the success of Proposition 8 in California, which will amend the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriages. Of all the threats that imperil us in these uncertain times, that this is what they chose to focus on is a depressing comment indeed.
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November 6, 2008 – 11:54 pm
A thirteen-year-old girl, walking to visit her grandmother, is accosted and raped. She reports the assault to the local authorities, whose response is swift: they take her to a stadium, bury her up to her neck, and, with a large crowd watching, stone her to death as she begs for mercy. The men who raped her are not arrested.
It’s just a cultural thing. Not any business of ours, really.
November 5, 2008 – 11:24 pm
I may look and sound pretty tough, but actually I’m a pushover. Beneath my gruff and menacing exterior I’m a sentimental old softie, a big ball of moosh. I’m particularly susceptible to movies: the tear-jerkers move me to unseemly and lachrymose upwellings of empathy, and the scary ones just beat the hell out of me. I hate it.
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November 5, 2008 – 2:05 pm
Both John McCain and Barack Obama gave fine speeches last night. Mr. McCain gave an honorable and gentlemanly address that was untainted by bitterness, and Mr. Obama’s speech was both sober and uplifting. I must comment on one thing in particular, before I am scooped by all the language mavens out there: Mr. Obama’s phrase “the enormity of the task that lies ahead”.
The word enormity refers, in careful usage, not to hugeness, but to monstrosity of evil — as in “the world stood aghast at the enormity of Germany’s crimes”. I was startled to hear Mr. Obama, who is very careful with language, and who obviously put a great deal of effort into this speech, use this word. I wonder if he meant to.
November 4, 2008 – 11:38 pm
Well! There you have it. The Democratic Party seems to be giving the Republicans a thumping of historic proportions. (They might have managed this four years ago, had they not put forward as their champion that pompous and insufferable windbag, the lugubrious thatch-crowned Ent John Kerry.)
I have a feeling I am not the only blogger banging at his machine this evening, so I will say only that it will be interesting to see, now that he has claimed the glittering prize, how Barack Obama will govern. Given his background, and the conquest of both House and Senate by the Democrats, he might be emboldened to press forward with a far-left agenda, one that would surely enrage the powerless Right. Or he might make good on his campaign pledge to work toward national unity, and govern much more toward the center than people such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (and indeed many of the folks in my neighborhood) would like. We’ll just have to see.
I will say that it is a triumph for America that a black man can now have been elected President. Maybe in another hundred years or so we can get an atheist in there too.
November 4, 2008 – 7:19 pm
I know I said I would shut up about Sarah Palin, and I will, sort of. But Christopher Hitchens is under no such obligation, and he wrote a tart little item a few days ago. We read:
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November 3, 2008 – 11:56 pm
We’ve heard a lot lately about anti-intellectualism. The word “intellectual” often evokes, it seems, negative associations even in people who could fairly be called intellectuals themselves; we’ve even seen some of that in recent discussions here. Why?
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November 1, 2008 – 3:01 pm
I have a fairly uncomplicated genealogy: Cornish, Scottish and Welsh (Pollock/Polk, and Lloyd) on my father’s side, and Scottish, back into the remotest mists of time (along the Calder/Cawdor and Morrison lineages) on my mother’s. (That my name is Pollack, not Pollock, is only due, as it turns out, to a paperwork error that happened when my parents came to the US in 1956 — which I was startled to learn only about a year ago.)
So, because I am caught up in a busy social swirl today, with scant time for scribbling, here is an old Welsh song for you all to enjoy, as transcribed for us by the late, great Robert Benchley:
Welsh Song
Wirion digon gul noch noch
With a hey down derry and a ddwpllwdpoch
Ei gsith och deb nam ryddid gam
With a hey derry derry di-do caethion pam.
Llewsithery fwllned dinam cru
Gwerthyr yw brenin myy fansth
Sing hey for the nhaith meddyn ddica gstrth.
Rousing, no?
Speaking of Robert Benchley, by the way, you haven’t really gotten to know the fellow without having seen his Oscar-winning short documentary from 1935, How to Sleep. Here it is.
October 31, 2008 – 10:57 pm
The current presidential contest — which got underway, if memory serves, back in the late ’50s or early ’60s — appears, impossibly, to be in its final days. It has seemed so hyperbolically prolonged, like some geometric distortion of spacetime itself, that I rather suspect that when it is over the world will end in a thunderclap, as was the predicted result in that old story about the monks moving metal discs in the temple in Benares — but more likely, I suppose, is that Wednesday will simply dawn as usual, the parties’ lawyers will get on with their lawsuits, and the rest of us will get back in the barrel.
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October 29, 2008 – 10:49 pm
I’ve got into a bit of a scuffle commenting on a post over at The Gypsy Scholar; I made some unkind remarks about the Republican vice-presidential nominee, and elicited a snappy rebuke.
I will cop to the charge of using fairly strong language, bordering on incivility. I may even be showing symptoms of what some GOP partisans have been calling “Palin Derangement Syndrome”. I confess in open court that the shocking fact, and ludicrous spectacle, of Ms. Palin’s vice-presidential candidacy does indeed arouse in me an uncomfortably itchy irritation, and an unwelcome emotional mixture of sadness, embarrassment, and vexation.
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October 28, 2008 – 11:51 pm
From a commenter over at Gypsy Scholar (by way of our reader JK) comes a link to an article by George Monbiot entitled “How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington”:
How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind’s closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?
Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.em>
Reason number one that Americans are such blockheads: their mind-strangling religious fundamentalism. Read the rest here.
October 28, 2008 – 11:08 am
I haven’t written much about music lately, and have almost never, I think, written about my own musical background, other than as a recording engineer. But I have played the drums and the guitar since I was a boy, and before I landed my first job in a recording studio and began a career at the console, my plan was to achieve mega-stardom at the drum-kit.
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October 27, 2008 – 10:18 pm
We note with grim satisfaction the conviction of Senator Ted Stevens. It has the feeling of justice long-postponed and richly deserved.
It’s just a drop in the bucket, though, as Mark Twain reminds us:
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.”
Celebration would be premature: the man is still seeking re-election. He may well win; as we have seen lately, standards are rather low up there.
October 27, 2008 – 10:34 am
In today’s Wall Street Journal, economist Arthur Laffer (he of the famous Laffer Curve), tells us just how bad things are.
October 26, 2008 – 9:55 pm
Following on from yesterday’s post, I’d like to look more closely at the matter of potentiality.
As mentioned previously, the argument put forward by Bill Vallicella in his discussion of abortion at The Maverick Philosopher is that from the moment of conception the zygote has the potential to become a fully developed adult, a rights-possessing member of society, and that in virtue of this potential the zygote itself should be accorded the right to life. We should do this, the argument goes, because we already accord the right to life to other entities that are only potentially qualified, namely babies and small children, and therefore to deny this consideration to the conceptus is to apply the principle inconsistently.
A central assumption in this line of reasoning is that the potential for full-fledged personhood is not only present in both zygote and neonate, but is also only either present or absent, and not the sort of property that admits of degrees. In other words, Bill insists that it is wrong to say that the full-term fetus has more potential for rights-possessing adulthood than a unicellular zygote. I think this assumption is wrong.
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October 25, 2008 – 2:17 pm
As mentioned in our previous post, there is a discussion ongoing at The Maverick Philosopher on the subject of abortion. The argument put forward (see yesterday’s post for a very brief synopsis) is that a fertilized zygote has the potentiality to become a fully developed, rights-possessing adult — and, in virtue of that, should be accorded moral consideration, and the right not to be deprived of life, from the moment of conception. I think this is an oversimplification of at least two aspects of the problem.
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October 23, 2008 – 11:35 pm
Over at his website The Maverick Philosopher, Dr. William Vallicella has been puting together a philosophical defense of the pro-life position based on an argument from the potential personhood of the conceptus. His argument runs as follows:
1. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between neonates and young children and fetuses.
3. [This principle of potentiality] should be applied consistently to all like cases.
Therefore
4. We should ascribe the right to life to fetuses on the basis of their potentialities.
This is a coherent and possibly persuasive argument, but I think it must overcome two objections that I hope to put forward in the next few days (as time permits). Meanwhile, please have a look; I am curious to know what you all think.
October 23, 2008 – 11:24 pm
A while back we offered a link to videos of a conference called Beyond Belief. It featured talks by an outstanding panel of thinkers — most of them Godless heathens — about the growing scientific understanding of religion as a biological and anthropological phenomenon, and about the alarming role still played by faith and superstition in human affairs. Another round of the conference took place earlier this month, and there is a new crop of videos to watch. The theme this year was stated as follows:
Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark is the third in an annual series of conversations: an ongoing project to foster and promote the use of reason in formulating social policy. This year, we asked participants to propose a Candle — a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion.
You can find the videos here.
October 22, 2008 – 11:05 pm
There is a mode of locution known as the Sports Present: one hears it often, and almost exclusively, during broadcasts of athletic competitions. It is employed, when discussing some action that has just taken place on the field, to point out that had something in the execution gone differently, a different result would have ensued.
For example: imagine that a running-back, having broken free in midfield, has just been dragged to the ground at the five-yard line after a long and promising sprint. Our announcer, having glimpsed in his mind’s eye some neighboring “possible worlds”, offers the following counterfactual analysis:
“If Csonka breaks that tackle, it’s six points for Miami!”
That’s the Sports Present.
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October 20, 2008 – 11:19 pm
Well, we’ve just got back to New York, and should be resuming normal operations shortly.
In the preceding post I neglected to mention the award given to the second-place winner: it was a copy of an amusing little book called Plato And A Platypus Walk Into A Bar…, in which the authors, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, introduce readers to basic philosophical ideas by way of jokes. Those with any familiarity with the subject won’t be learning anything new, but it’s an entertaining, breezy read, and the jokes are good. I offer a couple of examples below.
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October 18, 2008 – 10:28 pm
Well, the 2008 Wellfleet Oysterfest Spelling Bee is in the books, and I did not win. I did come in second, but my hope of building on last year’s triumph to establish the foundations of a dynasty is dashed. I was beaten by a fine speller named Maria something, from Jamaica Plain, which is apparently a neighborhood somewhere in Boston.
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October 18, 2008 – 11:53 am
I apologize for the scanty content this weekend; we are in Wellfleet for the annual Oysterfest, and there has been little time for solitary scribbling. (This afternoon I will attempt to defend my title at the town’s annual Spelling Bee.)
Back to normal later this week.
October 16, 2008 – 2:37 pm
We’re traveling this evening, and there won’t be much time for writing. But as you know, I hate to send you along empty-handed — so here is a particularly gratifying video clip, courtesy of Alex Bragg, one of my younger (and more formidable) training brothers down at the kwoon.
October 16, 2008 – 1:02 am
In Wednesday’s Times was a depressing article about the prevalence and persistence of racism and lowbrow religious fundamentalism in the American South. Combined with a proudly anti-intellectual ignorance, and the hair-trigger tradition of violence in the name of “honor” that is the legacy of herdsmen-descended cultures everywhere on Earth, it all makes for a grotesquely toxic brew. I do hope the Secret Service is getting lots of rest.
Read the story here.
October 15, 2008 – 11:11 am
Two days ago Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, gave a withering assessment of the McCain campaign. I find myself agreeing with every word of it, in particular the last paragraph. Read it here.
October 14, 2008 – 10:46 pm
Google has, for ten years now, been an amazing engine of creativity. Not content with their brand literally becoming a synonym for Internet search, they have kept up a steady output of innovative technology: GMail, GTalk, Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Sky, Google Moon, Google Mars, Google Groups, Google Book Search, and on and on. (I realize they didn’t invent all these things; I remember when Google Earth was Keyhole, for example. But they knew what to buy — and once they buy something, they make it much better.) I’d be amazed if there is a computer user in all of America who doesn’t interact with Google on a regular, if not daily, basis.
Much of what they have built their empire on has to do with the creation and management of online “content”. Now they have turned their all-seeing Eye upon a serious problem: those folks who occasionally generate such content at times when, for various reasons, they are suffering temporary handicaps of judgment and style. In one of the company’s lesser triumphs, the boffins at Google now offer GMail users a solution, sort of. Learn more here.
October 13, 2008 – 11:01 pm
It’s an unusually quiet night here in Brooklyn. The air on the deck overlooking my little garden is cool, dewy, and oddly fragrant; it feels more like California than Gotham. There is a full moon above, high in the sky and shining brightly through thin clouds; tonight a pale and glowing halo surrounds it, at the compulsory radius of twenty-two degrees.
These are strange days. I’ve been blundering about this world now for 52 years, and although, like most people, I’ve been fast asleep most of the time, still, I can’t recall when there was such a curiously expectant tension in the air. Of course there are all the usual cataclysms and upheavals — and right now, even some pretty unusual ones — but I’m talking about something else, something more subtle and pervasive, like a faint rumble just below the threshold of hearing, or as if something enormous and unseen were passing close by. It seems fraught with both peril and promise. I wish I knew what it was.
October 12, 2008 – 1:40 pm
There has been ample sound and fury lately about Barack Obama’s association with the former Weatherman William Ayers. From the Right we hear that they were, and are, unrepentant comrades-in-arms, and that their working nowadays within “the system” is merely a deception to mask their shared and undiminished ardor for its destruction. From the Left we hear that Mr. Obama has no more in common with, or personal connection to, Mr. Ayers than he has with Yogi Berra.
The plot may, however, have thickened. A commenter over at The Gypsy Scholar has posted a link to a lively little item in the online journal American Thinker that makes the provocative assertion that Mr. Obama’s acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, was written, not by Mr. Obama, but by William Ayers himself.
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October 11, 2008 – 9:36 pm
My daughter ChloÁ« brings to our attention a short propaganda film made by Walt Disney in 1943. Called Education for Death, it explained to the American movie-goer just how Hitler’s totalitarian apparatus, having got hold of Germany’s children, turned them into obedient Nazi myrmidons.
The film is apparently well known — it has a detailed entry in Wikipedia — but I hadn’t heard of it before. Perhaps you haven’t either. Here it is. (And if the video’s gloomy tone gets you down, cheer up with this effervescent little item, featuring Donald Duck.)
October 11, 2008 – 9:04 pm
The light-bulb joke is one of the tersest and most effective of all humorous forms. Always brief, in a few words it encapsulates some essential quality of its target, usually with stinging accuracy. For example:
Q: How many feminist authors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: That’s not funny!
The “inconvenient truth” exposed by this lighthearted quip is one that we men, or at least those of us in heterosexual relationships, have all learned the hard way: women, taken as a whole (ahem), just don’t seem to have anything like the sense of humor that men do. Indeed, I’m sure that amongst any women reading this post, some of you are already preparing a case for why the knee-slapper cited above actually isn’t funny, for this or that reason — which of course only proves the point.
In January 2007 Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay for Slate in which he tried to make sense of this awkward fact. Read it here.
October 10, 2008 – 11:24 pm
It’s 11:15 p.m., and the first free moment I’ve had all day. But although there’s much to discuss, I’m just too worn out. So instead I will direct you to another worthwhile column by David Brooks. In today’s essay he looks at the lamentable cult of anti-intellectualism that has hijacked the American conservative movement.
Can you imagine William Buckley choosing a ninny like Sarah Palin as a running mate? No, I can’t either. Read Mr. Brooks’s piece here.
October 8, 2008 – 10:43 pm
Every four years we hear a lot about “red states” and “blue states”, and see a lot of correspondingly decorated maps. I wonder who picked the colors, and how people feel about them.
I much prefer blue to red myself; I see red as being a restless, angry color, and blue as cool, thoughtful, and soothing. No matter which political party I felt drawn to — and for me it’s neither of the two, really — I’d want to be the blue part of the map. So I’m curious: is it just me? How do the proud Republican voters in those red states feel about being Red and not Blue?
October 7, 2008 – 11:27 pm
I’ve just watched the latest debate, and I believe that John McCain’s odds of victory in November are getting longer. In tonight’s forum he seemed more like an eccentric, crusty, and somewhat rambling old codger than ever before, while Barack Obama seemed sharp, forward-looking, articulate, and focused, with a great many more details and specifics ready at hand. My own choice was already made — barring revelations, between now and Election Day, of actual treason on Obama’s part, the nomination of the Pentacostalist bumpkin Sarah Palin had already made it impossible for me seriously to consider voting for Mr. McCain — but I think that after tonight’s entertainment many of those who were still undecided will no longer be.
October 7, 2008 – 11:13 pm
Things may be falling apart here on Earth, but humanity’s nobler impulses have found a worthy expression today, with the release of a gallery of images from the MESSENGER project’s flyby of Mercury. Here.
October 6, 2008 – 12:46 am
I don’t read a great deal of fiction — less and less, in fact, as I’ve gotten older. It’s not that I don’t enjoy or appreciate a good novel — I do — but time is short (and getting shorter), and I still have an awful lot to learn.
One thing that distinguishes the forms is that non-fiction’s value rests primarily upon the practical expertise of the author. If I have in hand, say, a book about the taxonomy of cichlid fishes in Lake Victoria, I am reading it because I am curious about this fascinating topic, and assume that the author knows a lot more about it than I do. He will have spent many years in the field, examining the unique geological and biological circumstances that have made this enormous lake such a productive and instructive laboratory of vertebrate evolution. I will expect that he has drawn important lessons from these years of detailed study, lessons that make possible a broader and more general understanding of life’s history and origins.
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October 5, 2008 – 11:39 pm
According to today’s news, Pope Benedict XVI is concerned that “modern culture” is to blame for a rising tide of irreligion. People are “brushing God aside”, he laments, and nothing good will come of it.
Well, certainly nothing good is going to come of it for folks in his line of work, so it’s understandable that he would be upset. And to be sure, “modern culture” is indeed to blame — if by that he refers to Western civilization’s increasingly successful attempt, in recent centuries, to rid itself of the stifling superstitions that have held us in thrall throughout our dark and bloody history.
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October 4, 2008 – 11:54 pm
It’s been a busy couple of days, and having had scant time for reading, quiet reflection, or writing, I have nothing original to offer this evening. But I hate to send you off empty-handed, so I invite you all to have a look at this year’s winners of the prestigious Ig Nobel Prize, which included such landmark studies as:
- BIOLOGY PRIZE. Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.
- ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE. Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de SÁ£o Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.
- COGNITIVE SCIENCE PRIZE. Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and ÁgotÁ¡ TÁ³th of the University of Szeged, Hungary, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.
All that and more, here. We’ll be back in harness shortly.
October 2, 2008 – 11:50 pm
I expect most of you watched this evening’s entertainment. It is hard to imagine when in history more opinions might simultaneously have been publicly expressed than at this very moment, and I don’t suppose mine is very much different from anyone else’s, but here it is: Sarah Palin handled herself about as well as anyone could have hoped she would, and Joe Biden handled himself every bit as well as he needed to.
What McCain supporters feared, and Obama supporters hoped for, certainly did not happen: that Ms. Palin would continue, for an hour and a half, to embarrass herself as virtuosically as she did in the few minutes she spent last week with Katie Couric. She managed to express the appropriate “talking points” safely, confidently, without wandering out of the shallow end of the pool, and without melting away into rambling and incoherent babble. Her legions of supporters — wherever uncertainty is for sissies, and men of God clog the creeks with the saved — will be thrilled.
This has to count as a victory of sorts for her. Samuel Johnson once said: “A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Ms. Palin’s sex is irrelevant here, of course, but the quotation seems apt.
October 2, 2008 – 11:35 am
Reader Bob Koepp calls our attention to an interesting and informative essay. Its author, historian Scott Reynolds Nelson, makes the case that today’s banking crisis most resembles not the stock-market crash of 1929, but a European mortgage crisis that resulted from the so-called “American Commercial Invasion” of 1873. Have a look here.
October 1, 2008 – 11:15 pm
My apologies to all of you who might have visited today, or emailed me. My website and mailserver were down all day due to troubles at the hosting facility in Utah.
I’ve had some bad luck in the past: when I started this blog back in 2005 I signed on with a company called 1GBHosting.com, and after a few months they simply went out of business, without the slightest warning. I had no backups, and what I was able to recover I got from old pages that Google had cached. Much was just lost.
The situation today was another matter — I now use Bluehost, a very good company with excellent service and support — but I willl confess that it was rather uncomfortable to have mail and website just gone all day. By the afternoon I was starting to see a blinding, but oddly comforting, white light…
Anyway, we’re back, and thanks to those of you who sent concerned emails.
September 30, 2008 – 11:12 pm
If you have, at this point, had a bellyful of this economic crisis, and rather than dwell on it any longer, are sensibly off drinking heavily and reading something broadening, then please ignore this post. If not, however, here is another very interesting look at how we got into this mess.