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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
All that and more, here. We’ll be back in harness shortly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ll confess that the more I stew over whether or not to hope this bailout takes place, the more I feel like a sort of Buridan’s Ass in reverse: equally repelled by both options. With a hat tip to Bill V., we offer an item from CNN in which Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron tells us why its a bad idea. Mind you, he’s a libertarian, and while I like my liberty, I still see a broader role for government than does the average hardcore libertarian, who generally seems to want the borders defended and not a whole lot else.
For those of you who still don’t quite get how we got into this mess: have a look here. (Be sure to click at lower left for full-screen mode, to best experience the incredible graphics).
The proposed Federal bailout bill died in the House today, and the markets plummeted in response, causing a trillion dollars or so of America’s wealth to vanish into thin air. I have no doubt whatsoever that the bill, a top-down rescue plan that rewards a great many powerful people for their catastrophic incompetence, is a foul, stinking thing, a grotesque and insulting mockery of responsible governance, and a violent and brutal buggering of the American taxpayer.
We haven’t spilled much ink in here lately on the subject of the mind, but it is never far from my own. This evening I stumbled across the website of a marvelous organization: the Neukom Institute at Dartmouth, whose mission is “to foster collaborative research between computational science and other disciplines; educate future generations of interdisciplinary researchers; and develop new curricular, mentoring, and collaborative learning opportunities at Dartmouth.”
I do wish I weren’t so susceptible to the enervating effect of warm, damp weather. Today was exactly that: overcast and misty, without the slightest stirring of a breeze, too warm for comfort (mine, at least), with the humidity pegged at 100%. In me these conditions induce a feeble-minded torpor, a morose lassitude, an otiose and unsociable ennui that renders me utterly unproductive, and makes me poor company. I forced myself, with enormous effort of will, to do some training, in the hope that physical exercise would perk me up; it didn’t.
So if you have come here looking to find anything broadening or amusing, I must dash your hopes, as tonight the well is dry (and it’s the only thing around here that is). I would have written about Michigan’s extraordinary come-from-behind victory against #9 Wisconsin, which was perhaps one of the most astonishingly improbable sporting events I have ever witnessed — but if you didn’t see it yourself, you wouldn’t believe it anyway, and if you did see it, you know words won’t do it justice.
So all I can do is send you on your way, or invite you to browse our archives (which as of now contain 1,102 posts, ranging from lightweight froth to the utterly trivial; you can even try the brand-new “View a Random Post” link at the top of the sidebar). Or, if you seek something intellectually provocative, have a look at this recent post by Dennis Mangan about our genomic maladaption to agriculture.
I hope to perk up soon; there is a lot to comment on, and plenty of unfinished business. Do come again.
CNN is offering a new and helpful feature in their coverage of the recent Presidential debate: a complete transcript attached to a fully indexed video, with a search feature that allows you to enter a keyword or phrase and go right to that spot in the video clip. It’s not exactly an antigravity machine or interstellar warp drive, but it’s clever and useful.
Have a look here.
Well, like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve just watched the first McCain/Obama debate. I’ll just blurt out a few first impressions.
First of all, and above all, it is an enormous relief that for the first time in a very long while we actually have two plausible candidates, men of genuine intelligence and substance. No matter who wins, we are far better off. After Bush/Gore, and then Bush/Kerry — the nadir of American politics in my lifetime — this is immensely gratifying.
Some of you may be wondering what’s going on around here. There are new links at the bottom of each post, and all of a sudden the place is overrun with garrulous and unfamiliar visitors, some of whom are, well, not quite the sort of commenters we’re used to seeing in here.
What’s happened is that I have registered my website with a service called Sphere, which aggregates blog content and puts up links at various media outlets. So whenever I write a post that links to a story, say, at CNN, there will now be a link on that CNN page right back to our humble salon.
I’ve done this in the interest of greater exposure, but one of the most precious things to me about this little website is the intelligence, insightfulness, and eloquence of our little community of readers and commenters. If this new service begins to attract too many of the wrong sort of people — for example, I had a fellow yesterday complaining that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for all his Islamic swagger, drove a christian car — I promise you I will nip it in the bud, or move to some system whereby I must approve commenters before they can post here.
Thanks for bearing with me while I try this out.
Things have moved along a little since this morning’s post went up.
It has seemed obvious since yesterday that John McCain, having galloped off to Washington in the role of the United States Cavalry, needed — in order for this flamboyant gesture not to be seen as the most transparent political grandstanding — actually to do something once he got there. It appears, however, that he simply sat rather diffidently in today’s meeting with our president (who seems quite stunned himself), and it does not appear now that Mr. McCain had any clear idea whatsoever of exactly what “leadership” role he was going to play once he blew into town. (To be fair, nobody else has any idea what to do either, of course. As far as anyone can tell, this really might be the End of Days.)
By now, of course, you have all heard that John McCain, whose love of country and capacity for personal sacrifice know no equal, has sorrowfully set aside his personal ambitions to answer, once again, the call of duty.
It is hard to find fault with Mr. McCain’s ostensible purpose here. One can certainly argue that it is entirely appropriate for the Senate’s most influential member to drop whatever else he might be doing and show up for work at a time like this, and so Mr. McCain is perfectly positioned to affect wounded indignation should anyone make the cruelly cynical suggestion that he is motivated solely by his lust for the glittering prize that suddenly seems to be slipping away. It is a brilliant tactic, and indeed it may well be more than just a tactic: even though both sides are predictably applying the spin that suits their needs, the beauty of this move is that it serves both purposes — playing for the high ground in the political skirmish, and actually helping to get this crisis under control — equally well.
If nothing else, we must give the man full marks for having made this presidential campaign some of the best political theater I’ve seen in my 52 years, first with his selection of the ostentatiously underqualified populist mascot Sarah Palin as his understudy, and now with this clever gambit.
I’ve had my differences with Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella over the past few years — he can be an obstinate cuss, and we have divergent views on a variety of topics. But I’ve always admired his intelligence, scholarship, and the quality of his writing — and joining the conversation at his philosophical salon has appreciably broadened my perspective.
Today he has put up an outstanding post on what, in his view, it means to be a conservative. I find little to disagree with. Read it here.
Apparently Bluehost, the company that hosts this website, will be doing hardware maintenance this evening for a couple of hours starting around midnight EDT. We’ll be down during that interval.
Speaking this afternoon just a few short blocks from my Park Avenue office, Iran’s president Ahmadinejad informed us that the despicable American Empire is circling the drain, along with the suzerainty of our evil Zionist puppets over their innocent Palestinian victims. As you can probably imagine, I was downright chopfallen to hear such distressing news. But then, to cheer us up, Mr. A. reminded us all of an important fact that we should keep in mind whenever we’re feeling down: because we are living in the End Times, we can all look forward to the imminent inauguration of the Kingdom of God, presided over by the elusive 12th Imam, with our own doughty Jesus right by his side!
Now, I realize that our own Pentecostalists and other such sorts (who make up about 99% of the population, I hear, once you get out past Weehawken) may quibble about who’s at the top of the K.O.G. ticket (and I can name one in particular who is raring to haul off and smite those nucular-crazy Eye-rannians without so much as blinking), but at least they all have something in common. Kind of makes you feel better about this crazy old world, doesn’t it?
The good ship Britannia, with hull stove in and gunwales awash, slips slowly beneath the waves. Writing bravely from her deck, our friend, the estimable Deogolwulf, vouchsafes us a poignant glimpse of that mighty vessel in her mortal throes.
Here.
Today was the first day of autumn, which means it will be Christmas before you know it, and once again we’ll be racking our brains to find just the right gift for those hard-to-shop-for people on our list. My mother-in-law is a good example; she is is a woman of refined and particular tastes, and already has just about everything she needs.
But for this year, at least, I think I’ve got it taken care of. Have a look here.
While I might have found, prior to the national conventions, reasonable arguments for and against electing either of the candidates now before us, the prospect of the blithely ignorant Pentecostalist “hockey mom” Sarah Palin succeeding Mr. McCain as President of the United States should he die in office is so appalling that, as I mentioned in a recent post, the GOP ticket almost certainly will not be getting my vote.
Now Sam Harris, writing in Newsweek, offers a long and pungent essay making the same point, and decrying the anti-elitism of all those “just plain folks” who see in Ms. Palin the chance for one of their own to get — if I may paraphrase Mencken — her thumb in the eye of their betters.
Sorry for the dead air yesterday; I’ve gone and got myself involved in another wrangle over at Bill Vallicella’s, and spent too long over there to have time for a post here. The topic is the morality of abortion, which as everyone knows by now is a great sucking vortex of infinite confusion and intractable debate; the particular aspect of the discussion in which I have become bogged down, like a hapless mastodon in a peat bog, is the question of potential: does an embryo’s potential to become a fully developed child in the future entitle it to moral consideration now?
I try to keep my ear to the ground, which may account for my having missed an outré little story. Scientists from the Supernova Cosmology Project, who have been using the Hubble Space Telescope to scour the heavens for faraway stellar cataclysms, stumbled across something very odd.
If you’re like me, then Sarah Palin gives you the willies, just a little. I have nothing against conservatives — I hold fairly conservative views myself, on quite a few issues — but it’s the kind of conservatism she embodies that gives me the fantods.
One of the things that has always appealed to me about old-school American conservatism is its unrepentant admiration for excellence: its conviction that all forms of thought and expression are not equal, that there is high and enduring value in the great canon of Western culture, and that erudition and worldly perspective are valuable assets in a statesman. These last are not qualities that Ms. Palin conspicuously exemplifies. That her lack of them is for very many Americans the essence of her appeal is evidence of another, far ruder form of “conservative”, one that has less in common with the with the founders of modern conservative thought than with the lowbrow, unwashed populism of William Jennings Bryan — about whom H.L. Mencken once said: “His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.”
Fed up with those pesky Jews? Here are some tips for reducing your Zion footprint.
After a century and a half, it appears the Anglican Church may finally have got round to apologizing to Charles Darwin for its sneering reception of The Origin of Species.
Better late than never, I suppose, though at this point it hardly matters; the approval of this archaic institution hardly seems relevant any longer.
Story here.
We must note with sadness the death, from cancer, of one of the founding members of Pink Floyd, keyboardist Richard Wright. His Times obituary is here.
The other day I read a little article about Google’s News Archive Search service, and thought I’d take it for a spin. I wanted to search for something that wouldn’t have been written about much for a long time, so after a moment’s thought I typed in the name “Czolgosz”, which readers will remember as the name of the Michigan-born anarchist who shot and fatally wounded President William McKinley in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901. I was rewarded with a fascinating clipping from my hometown rag, the New York Times, published on October 27th of that year, shortly before Czolgosz’s immolation in the electric chair.
I headed home late from the kung-fu school this evening, and all the way along Eighth Avenue I could see the twin beams of light stabbing into the sky from across the river. They light them up every year: two colossal searchlights marking the place where all those people died, and the world changed, seven years ago today. Now that I’m home, I can see them from my back door, where I used to step out at night and see the towers themselves. The people in charge of these things left the lights on for months back in late 2001 and early 2002, but now they only fire them up on the anniversary itself.
The lights are so powerful that on a clear night they reach, effectively, to infinity. They point straight up, of course, but when you see them from a distance they seem to lean toward you as they rise to the zenith. It’s a strange effect, because in the ordinary course of our affairs we simply never see any vertical object of infinite height. But this is curiously fitting, I think; the event they mark had nothing to do with the ordinary course of affairs either — and has also reached, effectively, to infinity.
As you have probably heard, the folks at CERN have fired up the Large Hadron Collider, and it seems to be working: at least, the lights came on, the clock started blinking “12:00”, and so forth. By some miracle, we are all still here, and have not been gobbled up by a strangelet, or yanked into some cosmic wormhole. Actually, of course, we wouldn’t have been, anyway, just yet, because it will be quite a while before anything particularly energetic is happening over there, and quite a while indeed before any actual particle-colliding takes place. So to all the concerned citizens I’ve been hearing on the radio lately, gibbering in fathomless ignorance about how these crazy physicists are going to “punch black holes into the Earth” — as if the Collider were some sort of colossal seed dibber — you still have plenty of time to get your affairs in order, if you like.
Is something fishy here? If so, maybe we’ll call it “Billingsgate“.
Today’s Times carries on the Op-Ed page an item by foreign-affairs correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he makes a grim prediction: a 10 to 50 percent likelihood of a nuclear strike against America by our Islamic foes within the next ten years.
It is difficult sometimes, I will confess, to maintain a steady stream of penetrating insight and infectious wit. Although I know the pen is mightier than the sword, sometimes the flow of ideas is restricted, and occasionally, even despite all the momentous events transpiring in continents far away — like the approaching activation of the European particle accelerator — my creative engine remains at idle, and I just can’t get it up to speed.
So for tonight, rather than send you away empty-handed, here’s an unusual little website that for some reason seems oddly apropos. After all, you’ve taken all this trouble to come, and I’d hate to piss you off.
I realize that this may have limited appeal for most of you, but I just can’t get enough of this sort of thing. At the very least, it’s further proof that there is something for everyone on the Web.
In today’s New York Times Magazine is an article, by respected Mideast hand Dexter Filkins, about the realities “on the ground” in the tribal areas of Pakistan — a region that belongs, in any realistic sense, not to Pakistan at all, but to the brutal and illiterate warlords of the Taliban. Filkins makes the case that any notion that Pakistan is now, or ever was, a useful ally against Islamist extremism in this area is nothing more than a snare and a delusion, and a costly one at that.
Pakistan is in a very precarious and unstable condition politically at the moment, and besides being a safe haven for the most virulent Islamic extremism, possesses a modest nuclear arsenal. There is much to be worried about.
Read the article here.