Porlock Junior

Skip this, it's Sixties stuff

2011-02-05T10:30:00.004-08:00

Now, you probably already knew Billy Graham was a liar when it suited his profoundly Christian purposes, but this was new to me:

On August 10, 1960, for example, Graham sent a letter to John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president and only the second Roman Catholic to run on a major-party ticket. Graham assured Kennedy in no uncertain terms that, contrary to rumors, the evangelist had no intention of raising the “religious issue” during the course of the campaign.
Eight days later, however, Graham convened a gathering of American Protestant ministers in Montreaux, Switzerland, to discuss how to derail Kennedy’s campaign. The follow-up to the Montreaux meeting was a closed-door gathering of 150 Protestant clergy at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on November 7—the purpose of which, once again, was to sound the alarm about the dangers of a Roman Catholic in the White House.

That's Randall Balmer speaking, an Episcopal priest and author of God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush

A slightly belated answer

2011-01-15T17:05:00.007-08:00

Once upon a time I posted a question and said I'd provide the answer. Here it is, without the spelling error it had. The discerning reader will detect that this is not the set of answers to my constitutional quiz.

What was the first use of a printed form by a bureaucracy? When, what bureaucracy, what purpose?

In the British Library, where you may see it any time with no admission charge, there is a standard form, printed within a few years after the first Gutenberg Bible, for selling an indulgence.

Constitutional Answers

2011-01-15T09:04:00.031-08:00

Here are the answers to the recent Constitutional Quiz. Those who would rather know the question before learning, for instance, "It's his sled", will prefer to skip ahead to the original posting before reading this.

I have mingled the answers into the published questions because I hate trying to flip back and forth.

1. By whose power was the Constitution established?
(a) King George III
(b) George Washington
(c) The states
(d) The people
(e) God
You are expected to provide backing for your answers from the Constitution, in this as in other questions.

ANS: (d)
Always start with an easy one! Just start reading the document, and you have your answer in the first three words.

“We the People of the United States … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” — Preamble

Does this mean that all the people who have told you that the Federal Constitution is a creation of the States were wrong, including Thomas Jefferson? Yes.

2. Where in the Constitution does each of the following phrases occur?
a. Balance of powers
b. Executive privilege
c. Separation of powers
d. Supreme law of the Land
e. Wall of separation between church and state

ANS:
a. Nowhere
b. Nowhere
c. Nowhere
d. Article 6
e. Nowhere

3. The supreme law of the land
3a.What constitutes the supreme law of the land, to which the judges in every state are bound? (Incomplete answers get very little partial credit.)

ANS: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby” — Article 6

3b. Can such law be overridden by the constitution or laws of any state?

ANS: No. “…the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." — Article 6 still

4. The Preamble consists of an explanation of why the Constitution was created, and by whose authority. What other provisions, if any, contain an explanation or justification for their existence?

ANS: A quiz needs at least two easy questions, and this is the other: The Second Amendment.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,…"

If there is any other such item in the text, I'd very much like to know about it. Otherwise, see the Bonus Questions.

5. Three-fifths
5a. In the original intention of the Constitution there was a provision that counted three-fifths of the number of slaves, as contrasted with the whole number of all free citizens. What, specifically, did this provision have to do with?

ANS: Computing the number of representatives allowed to each state in the House of Representatives. (Also, now obsolete, determining taxes on States in proportion to population.) Article 1, section 2.

5b. Did that provision directly name “slaves”? Persons of some particular race?

ANS: No. It says “all other Persons” after naming those who are counted and those not to be counted at all.

5c. What was the purpose and effect of the three-fifths provision?
(a) To decrease the political power of slaves
(b) To increase the political power of slaves
(c) To decrease the political power of slave owners
(d) To increase the political power of slave owners
(e) Not really any of above, because there is a flaw in this question itself.

ANS: As you can guess, (e). The reason for (e): though two of the choices are simply absurd, the other two are comparative, and it depends what you compare to. To go down the list:
(a) and (b) are hopeless, because slaves could not vote; no one in their families could vote (hence it would be nonsense to argue about how women and children who couldn’t vote were still counted); they could never become voters; there was no one recognized by law or tradition to represent their interests politically. Three-fifths of nothing is nothing, which is not an increase or a decrease.
(c) Counting the slaves, who had no political power whatsoever, would produce an increase in the power of the slave-owning states relative to free states. Someone would get this power; that group, not being the slaves themselves, would be the people with political power within those states, who were the slave owners. Hence, the three-fifths rule would reduce that power.
(d) However, consider the political weight that a republic might assign to beings with no political rights — none of the rights, responsibilities, or privileges of a citizen of a free Republic; not even the rights that an alien visiting from any civilized country had either here or in his homeland, whether a subject of the King of England or of the Emperor of Japan. For such a being, whether a robot, a mule, or a slave, the correct weight in assigning representation would be none whatsoever. Relative to that, the three-fifths granted an increase in power to the slave owners.

Bonus question: Is 3/5 closer to 1 (the slave-owners’ preference) or 0 (the free states’ preference?

6. In the whole body of the Constitution before the abolition of slavery in the 13th Amendment, where is there mention of slaves or slavery, under those names or direct equivalents?

ANS: Nowhere. Examples of what it does name:
The three-fifths rule: "three fifths of all other Persons."
The slave trade: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit …" Article 1, section 9
Slavery in free states: "Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another" Article 4, section 2

7. Religion
7a. In the body of the Constitution as it was originally adopted, laying out its purpose and the laws and procedures of the nation, where is religion mentioned directly?

ANS: “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” — Article 6

(Bonus question: Why did these precise 18th-century lawmakers say “ever” rather than simply banning it as it bans other things?)
No answer here, as it's a matter of interpretation. But obviously it's a matter of strong emphasis rare in the text of this sober legal document.

7b.Where is any practice that is specifically religious mentioned?

ANS: An Oath, which is a religious act, is mentioned in three places: Article 1, section 3; Article 2, section 1; Article 6.

7c.Where is a distinction between any religion and any other mentioned? If there is such a place, is any preference given to one over another?

ANS: No such comparison is made directly; but for each of the religious acts mentioned in (b), the Constitution directly offers a non-religious Affirmation as being equally valid.

8. Name as many things as you can that States cannot do.

ANS: A list, not guaranteed to be complete, just long:

According to Article 1 section 10, it can’t “enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.” More things that they can't do under that section:

Charge import or export duties beyond actual inspection costs without consent of Congress.

Charge ships a fee for using a port (“duty of Tonnage”). Keep troops or ships of war in time of peace. Enter into an agreement or compact with another State or a foreign power. Engage in war, except responding to actual invasion or imminent danger.

Other things:
Fail to honor the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of any other State. — Article 4, section 1

Deny the privileges and immunities of a citizen to citizens of another state. Fail to hand over a person accused of crime in another state when that state demands it. [Now repealed: Fail to hand over an escaped slave] — Article 4, section 2

Merge with another State without consent of Congress. — Article 4, section 3

Deny its citizens a republican form of government. — Article 4, section 4

Abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. — Amendment 14, clause 1. [Please note: privileges and immunities for citizens; due process and equal protection for persons.]

Claim representation in Congress based on a head count that includes people (initially, as a proportion of white males over 21) who are denied voting rights. — Amendment 14, clause 2

Grant any State office to any person who has violated an oath of office to the United States or any State, without approval of two thirds of each house of Congress. — Amendment 14, clause 3

Assume or pay any debt incurred in rebellion against the United States. — Amendment 14, clause 4.

Abridge the right to vote, on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. — Amendment 15, clause 1.

Appoint (rather than elect) a Senator, except on an interim basis. — Amendment 17.

Deny or abridge the right to vote on basis of sex. — Amendment 19.

Deny the right to vote for Federal offices because of failure to pay a poll tax or the like. — Amendment 24

Deny voting rights by reason of age to any person of 18 years or older. — Amendment 26

That’s my list. Please supply any (clear, explicit) prohibitions I’ve missed.

BONUS QUESTIONS: Here we read the plain words of the Constitution and apply them to matters of fact.

Bonus 1.
Bonus 1a. Is torture illegal in the United States of America? (Here and now, not hypothetically or by debatable reasoning in some court)

ANS: Yes. The United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment was ratified by the United States on 21 Oct 1994. Under Article 6 of the United States Constitution it is, therefore, part of the Supreme Law of the Land; and every judge in every State is legally required to respect it.

Bonus 1b. If there are any conditions in which it is actually illegal, what are they; alternatively, what are the specific exemptions from that law?

ANS: As that law bans all forms of torture by anyone subject to our jurisdiction at any time (after October 1994) in any place, it’s easier to list the exceptions than all the cases. Here is the list of national security emergencies and other extremities in which this existing United States law allows an exemption: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” — Part I, Article 2.

Factual corrections will be welcomed. Interpretative arguments will be considered. Also, of course, any proposed additions to the list.

A Constitutional Quiz

2011-01-14T21:31:00.016-08:00

The other day, a posting at Mahablog suggested that people should propose questions for a quiz on what the US Constitution actually says. Having got carried away with writing up some of my favorite questions and got fed up with trying to get anything formatted at all in a comment, I've decided to re-post here.

With some revisions, of course. Still too verbose and preachy, but I may manage to improve it with time.

1. By whose power was the Constitution established?
(a) King George III
(b) George Washington
(c) The states
(d) The people
(e) God
You are expected to provide backing for your answers from the Constitution, in this as in other questions.

2. Where in the Constitution does each of the following phrases occur?
a. Balance of powers
b. Executive privilege
c. Separation of powers
d. Supreme law of the Land
e. Wall of separation between church and state

3. The supreme law of the land
3a.What constitutes the supreme law of the land, to which the judges in every state are bound? (Incomplete answers get very little partial credit.)

3b. Can such law be overridden by the constitution or laws of any state?

4. The Preamble consists of an explanation of why the Constitution was created, and by whose authority. What other provisions, if any, contain an explanation or justification for their existence?

5. Three-fifths
5a. In the original intention of the Constitution there was a provision that counted three-fifths of the number of slaves, as compared with the whole number of all free citizens. What, specifically, did this provision have to do with?

5b. Did that provision directly name “slaves”? Persons of some particular race?

5c. What was the purpose and effect of the three-fifths provision?
(a) To decrease the political power of slaves
(b) To increase the political power of slaves
(c) To decrease the political power of slave owners
(d) To increase the political power of slave owners
(e) Not really any of above, because there is a flaw in this question itself.

6. In the whole body of the Constitution before the abolition of slavery in the 13th Amendment, where is there mention of slaves or slavery, under those names or direct equivalents?

7. Religion
7a. In the body of the Constitution as it was originally adopted, laying out its purpose and the laws and procedures of the nation, where is religion mentioned directly?

7b.Where is any practice that is specifically religious mentioned?

7c.Where is a distinction between any religion and any other mentioned? If there is such a place, is any preference given to one over another?

8. Name as many things as you can that States cannot do.

BONUS QUESTIONS: Here we read the plain words of the Constitution and apply them to matters of fact.

Bonus 1.
Bonus 1a. Is torture illegal in the United States of America? (Here and now, not hypothetically or by debatable reasoning in some court)

Bonus 1b. If there are any conditions in which it is actually illegal, what are they; alternatively, what are the specific exemptions from that law?

[More to come, perhaps]

Answers will appear in a future posting, intermingled with repetition of the questions because I hate flipping back and forth when reading such things.

Update: A few edits, inluding moving question 5 to be question 2. Oh, and introducing question 6. And providing the second half of the Bonus Question.

This thing is being reformatted

2011-01-14T20:51:00.005-08:00

I'm taking a blind stab at using one of the new (not very) templates in case they make it possible to edit the setup by some less outlandishly stupid and antiquated technology than Blogger used to have. And in fact it already has an almost minimally decent appearance after about 15 minutes of futzing around.

Goody, and my thanks to Google for finally fixing things. (Whenever they did it during the two years or so in which I never looked at it.)

Soapy Sam redivivus

2008-01-11T21:29:00.000-08:00

I really ought to post here occasionally, but I don't. Getting addicted to putting up comments elsewhere. I think I'll cross-post one I did today.

First off, know that William Wilberforce, a major hero of the anti-slavery movement, had a son named Samuel, known to contemporaries as Soapy Sam, who became Bishop of Oxford, based at Christ Church [not College], Oxford, where he ordained as a deacon a shy don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. But none of this compares in fame with the time when he went to a scientific meeting and asked one speaker, Thomas H. Huxley, whether he claimed descent from an ape on his grandmother's or his grandfather's side. (Which grandmother? Which grandfather? Why not mother and father? Don't ask me, I'm not a Victorian.)

The news, reported by Tristero at Hullabaloo, is that the eminent Mr. Huckabee has cleverly remarked "If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that's fine. I'll accept that. I just don't happen to think that I did." (Isn't he just your typical American yahoo? He just happens to believe things. Explains a lot.) So I was obliged to comment:

All I can say is, I'd rather claim descent from the meanest ape in the jungle than from a man with all the advantages of a 20th-century education and access to the best scientists, and holding a powerful political office and vying for the chance to direct the greatest nation on Earth, who brings the discussion of a scientific question down to the level of a piece of personal ridicule that was stale a hundred years ago.

I lied. It's not all I can say.

AND who claims to be an American, born in the country whose patriots bled 200 years ago to get rid of Kings and Dukes and stuff, who thinks it matters who your great-grandfather was instead of who YOU are and what you've done.

By the way, Mr. Huckabee, where was your great-great-great grandfather on the day the Revolution started? Resting on the reputation of ~~their~~his great ancestors? Mine was *improving* on the achievements of his simian ancestors by fighting at Concord.

[Sorry for the patriotic snobbery, but there you are, you try to argue with a pig and preserve your personal daintiness.]

Bureaucratic trivia

2007-10-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

Recently I durn near lost all the contents of my Palm thingie and wound up reviewing a lot of the restored notes, including some travel notes from a couple of years ago in London. Then just now I saw Orac's captioning contest and its comments. The association reminded me of a trivia question:

What was the first use of a printed form by a bureuacracy? When, what bureaucracy, what purpose?

Bonus: Isn't it ironic? Explain.

Answers the next time I get around to posting something. Also, another printing-trivia question.

Be all you can be

2007-09-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

Now this is recruiting, from NASA, for astronaut positions:

The open positions require extensive travel on Earth and in space. Possible destinations may include, but are not limited to, Texas, Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, the International Space Station and the moon.

h/t to Unspeak. Which btw is a blog worth following.

Update, 2007-09-22:
A few posts farther down there is a nice take-down of some 9/11 rantings by Martin Amis. This in itself might not warrant a visit, but the comments thread, in the 20s after the 9/11 conspiracy theorist has had his say, is rewarding, as it drifts into the truth about Nazi analogies. The participants are not afraid to ask just what Hitler did that was so bad, anyway; as with pretty much any question to which everyone knows the answer, serious consideration of it clarifies the mind. Read it, and you'll be able to flout Godwin's Law (as it is usually misconstrued) with authority.

This blog rated R

2007-06-23T22:18:00.002-07:00

Well, I'll be gosh-darned, I didn't know I wrote such dirty stuff. Moreover, you'd think it would be rated C for Comatose.

But mingle2 knows best. According to their simple, free, automated and therefore infallible test, no one under 17 should see this stuff. Unlike so many purveyors of cute quizzes, they provide the reason:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

gun (7x)
torture (4x)
death (3x)
dead (2x)
sex (1x)

There you are, folks, discussing the Administration's policies is obscene and not fit for the kiddies. Knew that already, didn't you?

Give that photographer a Pulitzer

2007-05-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

This was in the paper today.

Raising the flag over Mount (post office) Greenburg, Kansas. [Not their caption]

What can I say?

Well, I guess I can say, "We're from the Government, and we're here to help." Remember that side-splittingly funny line from a few years ago? Now, of course, it's "We're from the Government, and we want to help, but our people and equipment are on the other side of the world, and anyway the Boss would rather make the point that government doesn't work."

But there was even better news on that same page of the Chronicle this morning. An ad covering 2/3 of the page announces that Jean Paul Gaultier has released a new fragrance for men, called --

Fleur du Male

Personally I think that the ad has sort of a Bawdy Air.

Belated final comment on Virginia Tech

2007-05-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

The news cycle is over; the tumult and the shouting dies; the vultures and the Faux depart. Orac has, naturally, found the ultimate worst comments on the shootings; you don't want to follow the link he provides; remember, he's a cancer surgeon and has a stronger stomach than mere mortals.

But within the range of what passes for normal commentary, there's stuff too stupid and malicious to deserve comment, but still needing it.

A friend saw a piece by one James Lewis in which the corruption of Cho by evil professors was documented, and asked people on his mailing list for comments on it. Being lazy and intolerant, I replied by merely listing a places where reasonable comment might be found. But Mauri Laitinen, an old friend and business associate, put the time into taking it apart in detail.

I think it's a particularly good job, and deserves to be on record in a place more public than a few people's e-mail archives. So, with his permission, here is the entire post.

At first, I thought it was just an example of using some sensational
event as a pretext for attacking some group or institution through
guilt by association. A tired, old technique. But as I looked at
it more, it appears to be also a deliberate and unjustified smear.

James Lewis, in the inappropriately named "American Thinker" blog,
answers his own question in the first paragraph. College does not
drive you crazy, at least in the literal sense. Of the thousands of
English majors who move through American universities, most do not
commit mass murder. They are not the people one sees living on the
streets; they aren't the people who go back after getting poor job
reviews to kill their bosses; and for the most part, they don't look
forward to careers wearing paper hats and asking customers if they
want fries. Many English majors, I've heard, go on to become
productive members of society.

Cho Seung-hui was violently psychotic. Apparently he had displayed
problems for some time. While Cho might have shared all the
confusion about identity, gender roles, morality, and the fairness
of social institutions that most students feel when they are first
exposed to university, it wasn't the cause of his psychosis; it
probably wasn't even the trigger.

It is disingenuous of Lewis to portray Cho as an intellectually
defenseless "resident alien." He'd been in the country since he was
eight and had probably gone through a pretty-good suburban Virginia
school system. It is likely that Cho had gotten into VT based on
merit rather than legacy or affirmative action. He had to be pretty
Americanized by the time he hit college. So much for "massive
culture shock." (OK, so I don't know for sure that Cho's parents
didn't keep him locked in his room until, inexplicably, they decided
to ship him off to university. I just doubt it.)

But surely Lewis doesn't believe any more than we do that Cho's
college classes caused him to become homicidal. It's merely an
excuse to launch off on a catalog of academic outrages. And it's
here that I have my biggest objection to the article. His examples
don't stand up to scrutiny.

Take Nikki Giovanni, a nationally known and much honored poet. What
Lewis calls her "self glorifying book" is actually a set of
collected autobiographical essays. Considering that the 64 year-old
writer participated in the civil rights movement in the South, she
might have something interesting to say. If you hopped down to
Barnes & Noble you could most likely find at least one of her poetry
books in which she deals with such radical subjects as summer,
growing older, and love of family. Yes, she also deals with racism
and the black experience, and the stuff she wrote in the sixties was
pretty aggressive, but her message for many years now has been one
of hope and optimism.

Lewis leads you to believe that Shoshana Knapp approves of
self-justifying criminals, but that is like saying a course on
mystery novels is equivalent to an endorsement of crime. And most
of her work seems to be analyses of 19th century literature.

Bernice Hausman is a feminist. Writing and researching about sex
change operations and gender identity is an issue in the news and
popular culture, so it strikes me as a legitimate area of
study. There's no evidence whatsoever that Hausman was encouraging
students to doubt their own sexual orientation or dress up like Milton Berle.

Yes, indeed, Paul Heilker wrote "Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of
the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The
Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)" in
1992. I don't have access to the journal in which it was published,
but I note from his CV that virtually everything he's written before
or since had to do with teaching composition. If I can remember
that far back I think it was actually a current reference to the
"Saturday Night Live" Hans and Franz skits. I think it's probably
an essay with a humorous title about teaching composition. In other
words, Lewis has served up another helping of red herring.

I especially like the reference to Lisa Norris' Toy Guns, and Lewis'
assertion that he doesn't know any Americans who are in love with
war. Well maybe he's right; I'll check with Dick Cheney right after
I get back from the matinee of "Grindhouse." Seriously, a professor
who writes fiction about guns and violence is somehow
suspect? Looked at the paperbacks they sell in any US supermarket
lately, rented any videos, watched any TV?

And Sheila Carter-Tod? If you look at her unremarkable website, you
find that she teaches composition, especially graduate dissertation
composition. As a side issue, which she clearly labeled
non-academic publications, she examined cases of backlash against
Muslims after 9/11 for the US Civil Rights Commission. This is radical?

Probably the most deceptive of Lewis' descriptions is that of Susan
C. Allender-Hagedorn. This fiery revolutionary perverts her
students' minds by teaching technical writing. She also has a
couple of external links on her web page to comics and to feminist
science fiction.

Then there was a Marxist, ho hum, and Professor Collier, who writes
about metacognition as applied to scientific thought. We must
differentiate between inducements to rage and inducements to
sleeping through class.

So what I'm saying is that James Lewis dug through the VT English
faculty websites, found--or in some cases manufactured--sensational
non-representative tidbits, speculated wildly that Cho had been
force-fed the most extreme social ideas, and used these
misrepresentations to smear VT and liberal arts education in
general. I had assumed that Lewis' examples might at least be real,
the sort of silly, offensive, or incomprehensible stuff you find in
obscure, refereed literary journals. There is no shortage of
them. But Lewis doesn't bother finding such examples; he just
misrepresents the facts.

It's worth noting that undergraduate students don't pore over their
professors' web sites or read their professors' esoteric papers on
disturbing social topics. (It's hard enough to get them to log on
long enough to find the next assignment's due date.) In fact, most
academic papers in most academic fields, both in the sciences and
the arts, go largely unread because they are too specialized or too
boring. The typical undergraduate English Lit curriculum is still
largely Beowulf, Shakespeare, 19th century novels, poetry, and one
or two courses on 20th century lit. At most, an undergraduate might
have to take one or two criticism classes where he or she might be
exposed to more extreme ideas, but somehow, such exposure just fails
to radicalize.

Finally, I think his interpretation--and elisions--of Nikki
Giovanni's poem, "We do not understand this tragedy" suggest
deliberate misrepresentation. I don't think it's a great poem (of
course it was written less than a day after the shootings) but it's
not a rant against capitalism or a paean to "adolescent rage" or an
attempt to deny responsibility. Lewis hopes that you won't bother
to read the poem yourself or read the condolences also on the web
page. If you do, you get a very different sense of what she and the
English Department are saying.

Lewis badly misrepresents the faculty and the English curriculum at
the school. It's just not this hotbed of Marxist, feminist,
anti-American rage that James Lewis has invented in order to
criticize. I've already spent more time than the article
deserves. It just bothers me that such cheap caricatures and
specious causality pass these days for thoughtful analysis.

[The piece was sent as two messages; the second part follows here.]

I've been more sensitive recently to what I consider deliberately
deceitful arguments by bloggers & newspaper columnists. Victor
Davis Hanson, who appears regularly in the SF Chronicle, is a master
of the false premise. Many bloggers seem happy to insinuate or
attack using made-up data. Or they just attack for fun. Before
blogging there were newsgroups. I stopped reading them because most
of the posts were so petty. Blogs, if anything, are
worse. Bloggers seem to feel no obligation to write truly
thoughtful articles, and readers rarely respond with thoughtful
critiques. Maybe it's a consequence of getting older, but I find it
dispiriting that thoughtful dialog seems so little valued. What's
wrong with all those stupid, ugly, perverted bastards anyway?

There's lots of Political Correctness in universities. There are
refereed papers, public utterances, conferences and whatnot that are
indistinguishable from parody. A while back you sent out a link to
that joke paper by the physicist Alan Sokal, which was accepted by
"Social Texts." What's even more amazing is that after he revealed
his own hoax, there were literary critics defending his article as
valid social commentary! As you may remember, I went back &
finished my degree a few years back. One of the essays I had to
read and comment on in a lit crit class discussed the threat of
Barbie dolls to a girl's self-image. As the father of 4 daughters,
I never noticed that they compared themselves to the dolls. To
kids, dolls are something to dress, move around, and play with. My
girls never even thought about whether they lived up to Barbie's
impossible physical standards. It's why I don't worry about Molly,
who used to pull the heads off her dolls, or Eileen who claims she
will get us back for giving her Malibu Barbie instead of Ballerina
Barbie. You can hear college students complain about all sorts of
PC things. For example, I remember a radio interviewee describing
herself as a "potential survivor" of harassment. If you think about
it, that means she hasn't been harassed, but she believes she will
survive a non-life-threatening situation. This would be really
disturbing if it weren't for the fact that most of us were just as
silly at that age, and we more or less grew out of it.

I'm not trying to be contrary, really, but I'm not entirely sure
there's an easy solution to murderous rampages. While I agree that
hunters and sportsmen do not need semi-automatic assault rifles,
that's not what Cho used apparently. From the reports I heard, he
had two handguns and a whole shitload of bullet clips. By
"automatic" they mean the same type of gun that the police carry as
standard-issue sidearms. The typical hunting and recreational
target rifles are semi-automatic, meaning that you can pull the
trigger repeatedly, firing a single shot with each pull. Banning
them would mean banning every handgun that wasn't a six-shooter and
every rifle that wasn't a single-shot; that's almost all the guns
made. As a practical political matter, it's a non-starter.

I agree that the gun death statistics are frightening, and something
must be done. But I think that the overwhelming majority of gun
deaths in the US are "accidents." Everybody made jokes about Dick
Cheney shooting his companion in the face, but few people pointed
out that he was an inexperienced hunter and drunk at the
time. Anybody who hunts (and I don't; I find no pleasure in it)
knows that the woods are filled with drunk hunters; it's an accepted
form of behavior. Imagine if the NRA had enough moral courage to
come out and condemn Cheney's reckless behavior and started a "If
you drink, don't shoot" campaign. And just like drunk driving, if
we started prosecuting hunters who were found drunk, we could cut
hunting accidents. We've largely eliminated the "boys will be boys"
excuse for drunk driving; we could do it for hunting. Another large
portion of gun deaths comes from domestic accidents. Again, if the
NRA spent less time justifying the civilian use of body-armor
piercing bullets, and more time running training courses (like the
used to in the fifties & sixties) and hammering home the idea of gun
safety, it would significantly cut the gun death rate. I know most
people don't agree with me, but I still think that we don't focus
enough public disapproval on people who are careless with guns. We
focus instead on the gun or on the tragedy. Not enough time to talk
about gun crime, so I won't. OK, so I'm a raging
conservative-liberal who believes that while most people have the
right to own guns, they mostly shouldn't because they are
stupid. This way I can offend both sides.

But back to Cho. The news media seems to want a simple cause &
solution. I heard one senator say it was a bureaucratic problem
because colleges cannot expel troublesome people. Had Cho been
expelled, it would have given him more freedom to plan his
rampage. As you know, most universities do not control access to
their campuses, which are so large that they cannot be physically
protected. So whether he had been expelled or not, he could have
walked on any time. Others rightly complained about the fact that he
had been referred for psychological evaluation but that he was
released as an out-patient. He was so seriously disturbed that
teachers in the English dept.referred him to a psych eval. Either
the psych eval failed to accurately assess him, or maybe he got
worse. What appears to be true is that his violent tendencies had
been noted and yet he wasn't put into the state database that
prevents the mentally infirm from buying guns. Since we've done
everything we could to gut national handgun registration laws, Cho
was able to buy all the ammo he wanted over the Internet. What
could have been done was with proper registration laws not only
could he have been prevented from buying guns, but the police and
his doctors could have been warned that he was trying to buy
weapons. That might have allowed some sort of intervention and
perhaps commitment to a mental lock-up. Would banning handguns have
prevented this tragedy? Well, no. He could have hidden a machete
and Molotov cocktails in his backpack. It wouldn't have been the
same tragedy, but it still would have been bad. So while we can and
should work to identify dangerous psychotics before they explode, I
don't know whether we could dramatically improve our percentage.

Does this by any chance work?

2007-05-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

N ow that Google has forced me to convert, is it a login change, or will they have screwed up the blog completely, as they have done to various people, on some of whose blogs I can't post a comment telling them that I can no longer post a comment there, because, you know, I can no longer post a comment there?

Testing, testing. If I can't make it work with zero effort, I'll try to get the word out telling where Porlock has moved to, if anywhere.

UPDATE: Yup, it seems to work. Wonder how all those others wound up with such a mess.

Latest meme announced

2007-04-14T01:38:00.000-07:00

(Or maybe it's an old one that I've somehow missed? In any case, there's no such thing as a meme -- pass in on.)

Of course you've been following the Kathy Sierra business. In case you haven't: a blogger who has received fantastically perverted sexual death threats, accompanied by publication of her address and social security number, and being one of those Weaker Vessels, has got all upset about it, and has been instructed by Kos to stop taking herself so seriously, because after all you get lotsa nasty mail when you post about hotly controversial matters, like, in her case, computer program design. In the Pharyngula thread about it, this has popped up twice, seemingly independently:

If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Then go back and get me a sandwich, dammit.

All the girls are wise

2007-01-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

and all the boys are indomitable,

and it goes without saying that all the children are above average,

at Marin General Hospital, where the two most popular baby names in 2006 were Sophia and Alexander.

And let's hear it for that great group, Bernard Knox and The Oldest Dead White European Males.

O Canada! O Falafel!

2007-01-16T01:42:00.000-08:00

Do not miss the show currently playing at Falafel Sex. (Office safe, unless your office has a rule against raucous laughter.)

I should perhaps mention that experiments of this nature have been performed not just recently, as stated in the report, but starting about 50 years ago. The results, however, were rather different.

What part do you still not understand?

2007-01-13T22:58:00.000-08:00

Postings Just say no to torture; Or, What part of No exceptional circumstances whatsoever don't you understand? and Horse: I'm not dead yet are incorporated in this document by reference.

Naturally, the real officers who make policy for real soldiers fighting an all too real war do understand it perfectly well.

Perhaps all the blogs in the world covered this on the couple of days I had the flu, and if so, I apologize for the waste. Anyway, the current (February 2007) issue of Harper's has an excerpt from the new edition of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, prepared by the United States Army and Marine Corps and released in December, after 20 years in which the previous edition held. (The new issue is not up on the site yet, oddly enough; but the text would be firewalled anyway if it were.)

LIMITS ON INTERROGATION
During the Algerian War of Independence, French leaders decided to permit torture against suspected insurgents. Though they were aware that it was against the law and morality of war, they argued that this was a new form of war and these rules did not apply. Illegal and immoral activities made the counterinsurgents extremely vulnerable to enemy propaganda inside Algeria among the Muslim population as well as in the United Nations and the French media. Torture is never a morally permissible option, even in situations where lives depend on gaining information. No exceptional curcumstances permit its use. In the end, failure to comply with moral and legal restrictions against torture severely undermined French efforts and, despite a number of significant military victories, contributed to France's defeat.

If you are of high moral standards, you will be offended by the mix of moralizing with pragmatic war-winning policy. Be my guest. Please excuse me from joining in. But they do understand No exceptional circumstances.

By the way, now that Lewis Lapham has retired, the Notebook apparently is written by a rotating group of editors; so far it has not suffered. This month, Barbara Ehrenreich, no less, writing agains Hope and positive thinking. The passage that almost covered my nice new issue with stains of spluttered tea:

Cancer? See it positively, as a "growth opportunity," and hopefully not just for the tumor.

The rest of it is up to that standard. And don't miss the sidebar "Paper Jam" on page 22, which it would be too hard to explain.

When the most dignified person...

2007-01-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

...at an execution is the mass murderer, you know something isn't going well.
[that guy on the Daily Show, quoted approximately, because I can't find a transcript.]

But the quote that's so obvious that everyone must have been citing it, and only an international conspiracy can account for my not having seen it mentioned once in the masses of commentary, is

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
[Macbeth, Act I scene iv]

However, Ms Four Sigma, whose wisdom in these matters is sometimes delayed by the salutary practice of avoiding the news, noted another text:

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng'd. That would be scann'd.
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
[Hamlet, Act III, scene iii]

Fortunately, we don't share those old superstitions about the moment at which a person is killed. Does Moqtada al-Sadr?

"He is out of touch with his cruelty."

2007-01-05T00:04:00.000-08:00

The competition for statement of the year looks to be tough right out of the gate. This one is from Justin A. Frank, MD, in an interview at Buzzflash, cited at length in the News Blog.

To save you troubling in guessing who the subject is, a little further text:

He is unable to think clearly when presented with new information. He cannot do it. He cannot read. He cannot pay attention to the Baker-Hamilton Report. He never looked at that report. He looked at the opening title, about a new way forward or something, and that’s what he’s been using as his slogan now. He is not able to process information.
I think Cheney, as much as he is malevolent and destructive and greedy and self-interested as an oil executive and wants absolute power, he’s out front about it. I think that he would have to negotiate in a way that’s different because he can’t not think, whereas Bush doesn’t think.

Spitzer-Obama: Still a good ticket for '08

2007-01-02T13:17:00.000-08:00

Franklin Fiorello Spitzer barged into office without too many niceties: took his oath first thing in the morning on Jan. 1, started signing a bunch of executive orders for ethics rules, and was heard to say, "Don't need no stinkin inauguration." Well, not really the last; I understand he took time off that afternoon to speak at the ceremony.

I give him his honorary nicknames as a reminder of how and from whom people can learn to be Democrats; and how the models don't have to be actual Democrats.

What rankles is the reminder that they tend to be from New York. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, whom we love and admire and support and who we hope will not betray us too badly, is doing a four-day whirl of celebrations that has Jon Carroll fuming righeteously this morning. OK, Speaker of the House, that's one thing to celebrate; and the first female Italian-American from California, three more; but can't we economize a little bit in these times of National Sacrifice? Oh, I forgot. If we sacrifice, the terrorists will win.

And whatever Barbara Boxer has been doing, it's not attending to business or paying attention to her consituents. Well, seems I'm not gonna give you a link here about her knuckling under to the recent campaign by various fuming raghead-haters against CAIR, which I saw in some good blog this morning, because I can't find it, and a quick Google News search gives me just one trivial item other than link after link after link to neocon bs. Like, we all know Google isn't biased and all that, so it shows that the fascists still dominate the ranking algorithms, and the info you get if you want data on a current story is still wildly weighted (by objective algorithms) toward dangerous malicious nonsese, so stop celebrating the collapse of the influence right blogophere, and gosh, do you think this could be a problem in getting across to the public?

But my proposal two years ago for a 2008 ticket looks at least as good as ever.

And several ponies

2006-12-14T01:15:00.000-08:00

The next time the Poor Man shows us a gusher of ponies, he'll have to think about whether to list their names. Go ahead, take the test. HT to Sunbeams From Cucumbers.

Speaking of the Poor Man, don't miss his rundown on the Democratic aspirants.

Dept. of Unintentional Prophecy: Doonesbury

2006-10-14T21:24:00.000-07:00

For the first part of this story, one must get one's Negropontes straight. Nicholas Negroponte is the MIT Media Lab guy; it's not his fault that his brother is a war criminal. (Well, knowing how siblings are, we should at least give him the benefit of the doubt.) He's the guy who designed the $100-dollar computer with wireless Internet connection, for distribution to people all over the poorer parts of the world. The hundred dollars is the estimated cost once it gets into mass production, and the moment it was announced, jillions of peopole really wanted one; but this is for people who need it. And he's pushing to get it into production and into people's hands.

The second part is about the second Mrs. Doonesbury. As you may recall, Mike met this young programmer at Microsoft, Asian of course (stereotype!), and wound up marrying her. I followed this passively, and it was not for some time that I took some hint in the morning's comic and realized who she was.

You see, that little spat we had in Vietnam affected the lives of Doonesburians, and not only B. D., who wore his football helmet through his combat duty. There was a rather nondescript middle-class couple whose adventures we watched as they dealt with the little Vietnamese war orphan they had adopted. One day Daddy came home to find Mommy very exicted: the baby, who spent a lot of time sitting in front of TV, had said her first word! Namely, "Big Mac".

That's who Mrs. Doonesbury is. I've forgotten the proof, but maybe somebody can dig it up. Professor Weil, are you listening?

Returning to out main story, there's an item over on Amygdala about Negroponte's work with his fabulous machine. He's now got a deal that, if it really works out, will put an Internet-capable laptop in the hands of every schoolchild in Libya. Not your favorite beneficiary, but you've gotta start somewhere, and it's not the kids' fault, you know.

So, the tie-in:

[...] The idea of a laptop for every schoolchild grew out of Mr. Negroponte’s experience in giving children Internet-connected laptops in rural Cambodia. He said the first English word out of the mouths of the Cambodian students was “Google.”

colorless green ideas

2006-10-04T20:43:00.000-07:00

Some day I'll write a real blog posting. Meanwhile, don't miss Brad deLong's discussion of how colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Seriously, you'll be glad you did, provided you don't skip the comments.

What is the Internet?

2006-10-02T23:48:00.000-07:00

People have asked that for a long time, actually years. And it's hard to answer simply; even Ted Stevens, a trained communicator, had some trouble making it entirely clear. Now, though, thanks to Seth Breidbart (no, I don't know who he is) as quoted by JP Stormcrow in a comment (#44) to a post by that's well worth reading for its own sake if you have any use for Bérubé at all, we have a clear, simple one-sentence definition, shorter than these attributions:

It’s the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship “can be reached by an IP packet from”.

When I say coffee...

2006-09-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

I mean Folger's Coffee. There won't be many people old enough and local enough (San Francisco) to recognize that one.

But Folger's is not on the agenda tonight. There are many important things on which I have many important insights at the moment, like what the Pope really said (what he was thinking is beyond me), and the nature of the entity known as Hewlett Packard and how that relates to Mennonites. So, rather than talk of any of those, here is le mot du jour. Passed, as you might say, to us by Orac, who does not take responsibility for its content:

" What does a coffee enema do, and why is it better using Wilsons coffee?"

Gospel music time

2006-09-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

I don't always agree with Pharyngula's recommendations on religious reading and listening matter. OK, I don't often agree. But this is priceless.

As if my personal blogroll weren't too long already.

Update: This Internet thing is expanding my musical horizons. I'm quite taken with this. May have to find their other stuff.

Patience rewarded

2006-09-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

At SadlyNo (via the Poor Man) we have news of a major threat: the Republicans may be losing the kook vote. In evidence we see a characteristically articulate analysis by Kaye Grogan laying out the reasons for that group which she calls Christians to abandon the party as it has abandoned them.

It's best summarized by mdhatter in the comments:

awe nice! that bit at the end

It’s time to start a new viable third party
I knew if we just waited they’d flinch first.

But that's not all; jpj adds,

So, building highways in Texas is a Christian issue. Huh.

It kind of summons up a picture of Kate going down the road to where they are repairing potholes with a huge sign reading, “Repent Sinners!” and screaming, “Blasphemers! You will burn in hell!” at the workers.

But of course! After all, they're paving it with good intentions.

Yo, Nesco!

2006-08-05T00:52:00.000-07:00

Today I figured it out, and I feel much better.

This morning I was befuddled. I had just received an appalling e-mail forward, one of a series on the general subject, which demonstrated by the force of anecdote and analogy how you must deal with an enemy: Hit him and hit him and beat him and beat him up and beat him some more and when he is finally cringing on the floor and moaning for mercy beat him and beat him some more and make him suffer and did I mention beat him some more and then beat him up, and when he has finally mumbled out the words "I was wrong" you will live in peace.

It had some application to current affairs on some other continent. The application was not left to one's own perspicacity. (I could provide documentation to anyone so crazy as to want to confirm that I am not exaggerating.)

This sort of thing used to the be property of red-state lumpenproletariat, ignorant of the world, deliberately and maliciously miseducated, and panicked at the bidding of the government in proportion to their insulation from the rest of the world by thousands of miles of ocean and in some cases an expanse of coastal states, terrified by the hideous thing that happened in New York and therefore requiring much larger DHS appropriations to protect Podunk, while New Yorkers who breathed the toxic smoke and the incinerated and decomposing remains of their fellow citizens have repaired what they could and gone on living and being -- thank God! -- New Yorkers. A thing for which I'm not sure I'd have expected ever to thank Divine Providence.

But no more. Now things like this come from people who are not pig-ignorant, who used to be, and still are in many ways, reasonable people. Largely they are people, and here we approach getting to a point, who belong to some ethnic group that shall not be named here, but I assure you its history in the USA is honorable or maybe stellar, and with a claimed heritage from those who gave us the upper limit of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Alan Dershowitz going over to the dark side may be shrugged off as almost predictable, but there are decent people who seem to be heading his way. Of course, the lever is the same "The very existence of your people is at stake" lies that the red states take from Washington, but the audience is different, or I thought it was. This upsets my lifelong assumptions and is disturbing.

But tonight, driving along and contemplating the necessity of exercising self-discipline to destroy such stuff without reading, so as not to be thinking about its wrongness to such an extent that useful thoughts are displaced, I figured it out. This is not real life.

I have strayed into a production of Rhinoceros.

Another righteous one

2006-07-31T00:15:00.000-07:00

We all know about Oskar Schindler. Lots of us have heard about Chiune Sugihara (whose name I had to look up just now), a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who, acting against his country's ally and disobeying specific orders, issued visas to thousands of Jews. And there was his opposite number John Rabe, a Nazi businessman in Nanking who sheltered thousands of Chinese from the atrocities of his country's ally.

But here's a new one: Dr. Ho Feng Shan, a Chinese diplomat in Vienna who, like Sugihara, issued as many visas to Jews as he could. He was an early bird, managing to get disciplined by his government months before the war started. And a late recognition: only after his death in 1997 did his activities come to light; even his daughter knew almost nothing about them.

Thanks to The Peking Duck, specifically to commenter bingfeng, for this. The blog is the Official Nesting Place of the Faction of Quacking Canards, and you can guess how much I want their proposed t-shirt.

What language do they speak in Iran?

2006-07-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

Another curious coincidence today, and I wish I remembered the term Jon Carroll used for this sort of thing. Not African swallow -- that's something else -- but some ornithological term.

Anyway, I was pondering something, a thing that I might even turn into a blog entry, when an irrelevant question occurred to me; and a few hours later in a completely independent way the question came up and was answered. So I might as well begin with the posting that was dubiously worth writing.

I had occasion this afternoon to muse on irretrievably lost opportunities; only institutional in this case, not personal; but there's a bit of sadness to all such musings. And it occurred to me that while the best short poem of all is "Jenny kissed me when we met", there is one great standout among the quatrains (or Rubaiyat, as we call them in Persian):

The moving finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
--LXXI in Fitzgerald's translation (duh), the popular and successful fifth edition

I admit to the Philistine position that this is an exquisitely constructed bit of verse. The images are striking; the antique diction is well suited to the context. Jenny is a great deal jollier; but then, as Richard Mitchell said,

Children learn what they most need to know from happy stories of the birth of kings, and grown-ups learn again and again what they most need to remember from sad stories of the death of kings.

I wonder what examples of the form, and short verses generally, appeal to people with properly educated taste. Of course, the poem is trivial and obvious. (Hum the "Ride of the Valkyries" (a thoroughly hackneyed piece) and it doesn't sound like much either.) But after all, as Dirac said,

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by
everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

I said "Persian" above, because I like the traditional, classical effect of the name; but, I thought idly, was that the proper name for the language? For that matter, is Farsi exactly, identically the thing named by Persian, or am I messing up my linguistics? So, a few hours later, I am looking at the Language Log, and there's an amusing note on Danish pastry, in which I find "Persian (or if you prefer, Farsi)." Turns out, a lot of the speakers of that language really don't like the foolish Americanism of calling it Farsi. Like talking of Deutsch or Nihongo; or worse, if I read one comment right, though I don't know enough German to read his humorous example.

All right, then, a bunch of people who care think that to say Farsi is to turn your back on thousands of years of Persia's civilization. I can get behind that.

Update: I mean, of course, I can get behind the sentiment of not turning one's back on a civilization, no matter what kind of dangerous twits may be momentarily the keepers of the flame. One can't be too careful what one says in these days of Freedom Fries. And I should have added a Read the Rest rating in the style of Amygdala, and a high one, for the if-you-prefer thread. Joseph Bell is particularly eloquent on the value of using corrupted forms from civilizations with which we have a long history of contact.

Nothing important happened today

2006-07-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

At least, that's the version of George III's famous diary entry cited by Wikipedia. It's pleasant to note that someone has marked the quote with "citation needed"; just try to find a citation, or figure out whether it's "important" or "of importance", by googling. But I digress.

Jon Carroll has written a column that can almost stand with his too-oft-reprinted Thanksgiving column. And if you hurry, you may be the 7,345th person to remind him that the fruited plains are not from Irving Berlin, but from Katherine Lee Bates. A fine piece, though, especially for those of us in that corner toward which, as Carl Sandburg(?) said, the rest of the United States slopes, causing everything loose to roll down into California.

Carroll talks of the land, staying mostly out of the politics. Extremism in defense of California is no vice. Carroll notes that "patriot" refers to "father" in Latin. But (speaking of Berlin), German has not only vaterland but heimat, from "home". A good way of speaking, if you can get over certain unpleasant associations.

Bates, however, had a political agenda, sneakily getting into brotherhood and stuff. (And will God crown my efforts with coherence? Not likely, when I see that the Language Log has annotated Ray Charles's missing of the subjunctive "crown", and that a Google search on crowned good brotherhood brings the good news that most references to the song that are not quoting Ray Charles get the words right.) And it's politics that created this day, and politics that I wanted to talk about.

To get down, then, to the document that we celebrate with John Adams and with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

And by the way, The Star-Spangled Banner is a damn fine song, as is America the Beautiful, even if they both drag God into it, and even if the Banner is warlike and bombastic. Bomburstic. Whaddaya want from a national anthem? At least we're not watering our furrows with the other guys' blood. And as to its being based on a drinking song, I ask you: if you're going to strain your voice, would you do it for "the land of the free and home of the brave" or for "the myrtle of Venus and Bacchus's vine"? Perhaps I'm courting the fate of Hippolytus, but my choice is clear.

So. I hold that the introductory section of the Declaration is self-evident. If you doubt it, you can read many pages of proof in the paper by Stephen E. Lucas. It is also an unsurpassed bit of English prose.

Whan that Aprille with her shoures soote

When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes

When in the course of human events

It need not be embarrassed to stand in that company.

But what about the famous bill of grievances against the King and his country? We all know that it's terribly exaggerated and unfair. And "merciless Indian savages," good heavens! But what about it, really? Wouldn't if be nice to see a sober annotation and analysis of the list? Lucas treats of the list, but his treatment is trivial: he analyzes the grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It looks to be a good analysis (haven't read it through yet), and by no means trivial; but I'd like to see a discussion of the real historical events associated with the charges and how the charges and the history relate.

There must be dozens of analyses that are simply dismissive: you know, the revolution was just because Americans didn't like paying taxes for their benefits, the ingrates. (If you want a rebuttal of that new discovery, which seems right now to be fashionable in schools, you might not do better than to look up the one written during the Revolution by an anonymous author who turned out to be Thomas Jefferson.) And the Patriots would be glad to provide some, when they find someone who can read eighteenth-century English, but of course it will be nationalist garbage -- though maybe they won't want to write anything when it requires them to take on that item about slavery: too uncomfortable a topic. Does anybody know of a good treatment anywhere?

Meanwhile, we can contemplate the exact meaning of "conquer we must, when our cause it is just", with reference to the many senses of must, and without raising the scorn of some eight-year-old cynic, as one school did in the Korean War, by replacing "when" with "for".

Is Mr. Krassner there?

2006-06-26T09:29:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure I heard of this one, but I hadn't seen the full text, which Denis DeKat has kindly provided. There are real subversives lurking in the heart of Islamic wild-assness, Saudi Arabia. ("Fundamentalism" is a term with a specific meaning, and we do not muddy the waters by misusing it.) I recommend reading the piece through; it's a fine satire, even if a bit too long.

It's only right and proper that serious-minded Islamists have taken the supposed authors to task for religious extremism; only to be expected that some others would have seriously taken it to heart, but in fact there seems to be no reason to believe that anyone has. Those who want to criticize the Saudi commentators for gullibility will do well to look up Report from Iron Mountain, but there is a difference: there are Americans who have taken that satire seriously and liked it.

(Do I believe the interpretation I've just given, or am I being sarcastic? Yes. I mean, mostly the former.)

Update: For contrast, read this, which looks entirely like the real thing, even when presented by a site that surely is violently hostile to Islamism.

Defending the mall against [what?]

2006-06-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

I seem to be leaning on Max a bit today. Via his next item, here's what security guards are defending against today.

Do you see why? Took me a minute, which I'll try to excuse on the basis of the misleadingly colorful illustration in Max's post. Answer is given in the comments. Or is it crashingly obvious? If so, why was the newspaper item so coy about it? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Birth Tax

2006-06-24T09:27:00.000-07:00

The party that traditionally has defended us from deficit spending and inflation and all that stuff has found a conflict between that mission and its other one, making life easier for the rich. You knew all that. But since there is so much attention being paid to the Death Tax as a way of fulfilling one of these responsibilities, it's only fair to take a glance at the Birth Tax: the debt that every American acquires by the act of being born. MaxSpeak has kindly given us the data. If you wish, you can cut straight to the graph, showing the national debt bestowed on each newborn citizen over time, expressed in 2005 dollars (corrected for inflation, that is).

Technical note: Why call it a tax? Elementary bookkeeping principles: You add a financial liability to the books, it's a credit entry. The balancing debit entry can be the reduction of another financial liability (nope) or acquisition of a financial asset (nope) or an expense (yep, a tax payment).

Homicide suicide

2006-06-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

Not having been driven off by the title's implication that this is about something truly horrid, you are a candidate to read this really remarkable sarcasm-fest from alicublog, concerning the new and seemingly unbeatable standard recently set for how repulsive a statement by a government spokescreature must be before you can use the word "incredible". If you fail to read the comments thread, you will miss much important material, including the strategy for countermeasures by Donald Rumsfeld.

A deconstructionist joke

2006-06-10T01:34:00.000-07:00

[Note: I may turn this into an actual post later on. After all, Edward Said, the National Spelling Bee, the brain-eating Hitler zombie, and deconstructionist gangsters could be the basis of quite an entertaining posting. This, however, is at present not it.]

It may not be all that funny, but it's late at night, and I have just spent too much time on a Google search, having decided on a whim that I would now try to find out a thing I had wondered for some time: just what Edward Said really said about "Aryan" languages.

I should say at the outset that I still don't have it quite clear. But I can now be quite sure that nearly everyone who addresses any question having to do with Said from either side, is an insufferable fanatic who is plainly incapable of saying anything that one could take at face value, at least on this subject. Alas, I pretty much knew that beforehand.

In the process I finally found a piece of good sober academic prose, which included an instance of a word I'd never heard of before this week (and confirmed my opinion about that word, on which I may manage to write more trivialities later), along with a quite unexpected sighting of a corpse that may turn out to be the brain-eating Hitler zombie. But that's not the paper I'm speaking of.

Then I came to another piece of non-nonsense, which I found worth reading through while skipping dense discussions of the author's specialized work (rather than invest my time in a long course of instruction to be able to assess the details of his argument, it being easier to stipulate that what he says does support his main point). And toward the end I was further rewarded by a joke:

We now know, thanks to the decontructionists, that not only is objectivity impossible, it seems it is even impossible to convey intended meaning. It seems that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the writer and the reader as well. No matter what the writer intends when he writes, the reader will bring his separate set of experiences and understanding to the writer's text. This is truly pathological. This means that the very enterprise of writing is unlikely to convey the meaning intended by the writer. This is a view that I find truly tiresome (and for those of you who have attempted to read deconstructionist theory you know, at least, what the word tiresome means. The impenetrability of the writing about this theory has given rise to much derision on American campuses--my favorite is the story of the Boss of a Mafia family who decided he would study deconstructionist theory. As a result, he was eventually replaced as the Boss because instead of giving orders that no one could refuse, he found himself giving orders that no one could understand.)

Actually, it's not all that hilarious, but anything that disses the desconstructionists is a good start, and as I said, it's late. If you were still reading, you might ask, 'Do you mean that is the best you found in a long search on <"edward said" aryan> ?' Yes.

And why haven't you ever asked this?

2006-03-13T22:39:00.000-08:00

And, obviously, why haven't I?

You might think that pundits would ask why the Democrats have NY and CA in the bag in every presidential election without spending a dime, when they're traditionally Republican states that will still vote for pro-choice Republican governors, but for some reason this topic is off-limits.

Thus spake Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Since I remember when California generally voted with the winning side in presidential elections rather than necessarily for the Democrat, I'm interested in his answer.

I thought Americans were supposed to be pragmatists

2006-02-23T19:37:00.000-08:00

But Brian Leiter knows his philosophy.

Ravens Imprisoned in the Tower

2006-02-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle (actually the Washington Post) tells us today that Branwen, Hugine, Munin, Gwyllum, Thor, and Baldrick have been put in protective custody in a comfortable cell in the Tower of London. Obviously I am not making up those names; who could?

This is to protect them from the infamous H5N1 flu. Should the ravens at the Tower expire, the Tower will fall, and with it the kingdom. They can't be removed from the Tower, under a decree of Charles II. The master of the ravens, Derrick Coyle, puts on protective clothing, for their protection, not his, when he feeds them.

They seem to be taking well to it.

"The first day they were a little bit stressed," Coyle said. But now, he added, "They're eating very well and Thor, the one who talks, said, 'good morning' straight away" when he visited the birds on Tuesday. He said the birds are eating their normal diet of hard-boiled eggs, apples, biscuits soaked in blood, beef liver, vitamin tablets and chicken."

"Good morning", eh?

Q. After a severe storm we found this old male raven in the study of my father, the Hon. George Morton Bodwell, for may years head of the Latin Department at Tufts, sitting on a bust of Livy which was a gift to him from the class of '92. All that the old bird will say is "Grawk." Can ravens be taught to talk or was Poe merely "romancing"?

A. I am handicapped by an uncertainty as to who says "Grawk," the raven or your father. It just happens that "Arrk" is what ravens say. I have never known a raven that said anything but "arrk."

-- James Thurber, pet advice column from The Owl in the Attic

Unnecessary to add: Time for Mr. Coyle to worry, when Thor drops his "Good morning" for "Nevermore."

How could they tell?

2006-02-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

When Dorothy Parker was told that Calvin Coolidge was dead, her response was, "How could they tell?"

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was running for the honor of being the oldest President in history, and some people raised gentle, polite, even apologetic questions about whether there might be a problem there. His campaing assured us all that he would get annual medical checkups, which would establish whether he was subject to any deterioration of brain function.

Guess what I said about that. To be sure, my response in 1980 became less funny in the 90s, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, which is not fit material for joking, which is why there are so many jokes about it. Well, maybe not less funny, maybe just a bit too offensive.

Now, as you all know, the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has a contest going. They will now start publishing contestants for the most offensive cartoons about the Holocaust and Jews in general.

All together, now! "How can we tell?"

If you have any doubts about this radically new editorial policy, ask Deborah Lipstadt, the historian who kicked David "What Holocaust?" Irving's butt in a lawsuit that Irving brought under the extremely plaintiff-friendly English libel law. She has declared that she is entering the contest. A piece of cake, she says. She has cartoons at the ready, really nasty ones, some them already in Farsi, having been taken from Iranian papers.

But this is old news. This morning it gets more interesting. In the Chronicle there is a reference (in the printed edition, but I can't find it in their on-line sotry) to the first entry published. First it quotes the paper as to the meaning of the contest, titled "What is the Limit of Western Freedom of Expression?":

The newspaper said its contest was a test of the Western world's readiness to print cartoons about the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews in World War II.

Right, so here's the entry:

The first entry depicts a man, smoking a cigarette and wearing a blue and white striped prison uniform, with a tall wall and guard tower in the background.

The man, with a moustache, is wearing a white keffiyeh (fez) and has his right hand over his forehead and eyes.

On his chest is a red Muslim crescent with a letter "P". Below that is the number 7 256, the significance of which was not immediately clear, although Israel is said to be holding about 8 000 Palestinian prisoners.

Now we see the cluelessness to which that once-great civilization has sunk. (And not as a product of Islam; of the thousands of years of high civilization in Iran, the most recent centuries were, of course, Islamic.) I mean: Duh, the guy is comparing Isael's treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews. Not, obviously, "Duh, it's true", but "Duh, they've been saying this for years, what's the news here?"

This unpleasant little item is not merely part of daily political discourse in the Great Satan; it's relatively inoffensive. From the description, I can't even see a direct reference to the Holocaust; it's just somebody in jail. Now if the number were tattoed on him, that would be getting offensive. Maybe the blue and white stripes, rather than the traditional black and white prison stripes, refer to Israel? Pretty weak. Where are the interlinked swastikas and stars of David?

Nest to the stuff that you and I have seen paraded throught the streets of San Francisco (or wherever), this is so inoffensive it's pathetic.

And the Iranians think they're challenging the bounds of discourse in the ~~civilized~~Western world.

Here's glory for you

2005-12-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

Mark Ungar of San Francisco provides a nice knock-down argument in today's Chronicle for the real meaning of Merry Christmas:

I assume, when I say "Merry Christmas," that whomever I direct the greeting to will understand that what I actually mean is: "Have a happy year-end period, regardless of which ancient tradition of marking the winter solstice you have inherited from your ancestral culture, and enjoy your chosen rituals of togetherness and renewal in which our similarities -- not our differences -- are celebrated. I am not a Christian, nor do I assume you are one, nor do I hope to convert you to Christianity -- but I still wish you a happy year-end period and confer such blessings upon you as a compassionate heart can offer."

But what do you expect of someone who boldly uses whomever correctly?

Listen carefully

2005-12-20T23:10:00.000-08:00

Zac passes on a Yahoo story that looks as if it would be awfully embarrassing to Bush. To be sure, Bush is not embarrassed by flagrant lies; but remember, he's wounded, and the rats are edging in, looking for a good meal and a bit of payback to the predator that they didn't dare challenge for a few years; so the rules may be changing.

(I am here shamelessly stealing from what I put in a comment to Zac's posting. Hope this doesn't violate any traditional blogiquette.)

Read the story, and see the series of flagrant lies. Then read those damning quotes again with an analytical eye.

"Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order,"

"When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so,..."

"...by the way, everything you hear about requires court order, requires there to be permission from a FISA court, for example,"

"any action that takes place by law enforcement requires a court order,..."

"Law enforcement officers need a federal judge's permission to wiretap a foreign terrorist's phone,..."

Y'know, when I started copying out these quotes, I thought I was going to make a real cute and satirical point, and by the time I finished, I had convinced myself (almost, anyway) that it's no goddam accident of rhetoric, but quite deliberate. Turn up the volume and listen again:

talking about wiretap
talking about chasing down
that you hear about
action ... by law enforcement
Law enforcement officers need

And you will hear the subtext:
However, the ones we are not talking about, because they are not done by law enforcement officers but by the Omnipotence, who does not answer to law or the Constitution--well, you don't hear us talking about them, do you?

Nattering nabobs will claim that Dubya doesn't have the brains to plan all this careful wording (agreed) or to stay on script like this -- here, I'm not so sure. The weasel wording is just too perfect.

So you think you're a wingnut

2005-12-13T22:44:00.000-08:00

or that you've seen wingnuts in blogs. Well, let me tell you something. You don't even know what a nutcase is. But if you want to, I suggest you visit Wikipedia to find the real thing.

You will come away humbled. If you want to know the unifying theme and the identity of that other person in the picture at the top, look at the last item in the list -- quite a reasonable one, in many ways -- of good guys. Then you will understand that list of beast-men, cultists, fascists, and colonialists.

One for your iPod(tm)

2005-12-12T01:15:00.000-08:00

Isn't wonderful how much free information you can get on the Internets(tm)? Here, for instance, is the obscure page that answers two questions that millions of readers have asked:

The question is, I think, easier to figure out than that for 42. Here, anyway, is proper credit.

PS:
In fact, three questions are answered:

. Yes, you will be able to speak of van Leeuwenhoek without sounding like an idiot.

. No, there is no uniform pronunciation from one end of the kingdom to the other; pronunciations vary no less than that of, say, Shakespeare does when you cross the Pond.

. No, you will never never be able to speak of Huygens recognizably no matter how many times you listen to the file.

Welcome to the Islamic Virtue Party

2005-12-10T00:43:00.000-08:00

So, Bradford Plumer took the test to see which party he agrees with in the upcoming Iraq election. Turned out to be the Iraqi Communist Party, but we knew that all along about these lefty bloggers, right? My turn.

Hmm, it really is hard to answer some of the questions, as one doesn't know what they really imply. As a commenter asked, what are the competencies of the Prime Minister under the constitution? So one hits the "neutral" button many times when one probably has in reality a strong position.

Still, I am a bit surprised to find myself in the Islamic Virtue Party (I wasn't kidding) if only 52% worth. Actually I disagree with them a lot (well, 48% worth), but they are the best fit for me relative to all the others. Sort of like Democrats, I guess. Also, there may be nuances. When we both disagree with "Muslim clerics should not have the right to be members of the Constitutional Court", I have the unpleasant feeling that they would still disagree if the words ex officio were inserted; slightly different notions of liberty, that is.

Looking again, I see could also join the Iraqi National Accord. Probably wouldn't like it any better.

Do symbols matter?

2005-12-09T23:44:00.000-08:00

And could their context and history make a difference? I'm led to such profound questions by an observation that NTodd made about what to light up as a Christmas decoration. But mainly by the fourth comment on that posting, signed by Ereshkigal, which makes a remarkable, if implicit, nomination for a Lifetime Acheivement Award in Insensitivity:

I live in a predominately African-American section of an (almost) Southern city.

A white family of Clueless Christians who live a couple of blocks from me light up a huge wooden cross on their lawn each year right after Thanksgiving.

Originally, they lighted it with hundreds of flickering votive candles, but now they use little flickering Christmas lights.

It's been a continuing source of discussion among the rest of the neighbors.

Fawlty Towers interval

2005-12-03T23:31:00.000-08:00

It's great how us young folks can just pop open the laptop and go blogging when John Cleese starts the segue into the fundraising pitch and we're in for 10 or 15 minutes of the excruciating price we pay for public TV, and I'm certainly not referring to the money.

F. T. is a subject of polite disagreement around here, though. Not that anyone fails to find it impossibly funny, of course; but some of us can watch it and some cannot. If the interactions of Mr and Mrs Fawlty are just too painful, that's pretty much it for watching the show. As it happens, I can put up with that. But the sequences they just showed before the break reminded me that I have my limits. The Nazi episode is fine with me, and the Corpse; but the Gourmet Night episode begins to strike too close to home. The Beating of the Car, in particular. Which raises an interesting question, which someone like Shakespear's sister with millions of commenters should pose: which bit of Fawlty Towers is just too much for you?

Flay Otters. time to get back to the show.

... back again.

The Sensible One Around Here suggests that we can just buy the freakin tape of this Fawlty Towers Retrospective and see it sometime without the dumb breaks. But I persist in watching it.

One wishes they would not feel the need to put in the little patronising (you can tell from the s that the a is short there) bits explaining what and where Devon is, and like that. But I suppose Americans need these things, and I'm just being unrealistic. I mean, is it necessary to explain that Mr Johnson (I think I have the name right) is obviously Fawlty's social inferior as shown by his dress and accent? Yes, I suppose it is.

Speaking of which, how bout dem accents? John Cleese is John Cleese, and that's enough. But Prunella Scales has that marvelous lower middle class affected accent (as I'm told it is). The aforementioned Mr Johnson has his unaffected lower accent. And of course, Manuel!

You know, it was rather a long time before I found out that Connie Booth did her extremely good American accent (not in F. T., of course) by nature and not by hard study; I suppose the English perceived that instantly; but even they, I think, must respect her accent when she was doing Polly.

Teribly funny show. Doesn't look as if they'll have much of a closer after the final membership break, but one must hang around to see. Meanwhile, off to read more blogs while they talk on and on.

A serious evil

2005-11-22T00:52:00.000-08:00

Tom Harper, speaking of the Cheney administration being put on the defensive, notes that Murtha is going to be swiftboated, and "...millions of gullible Americans will probably think he burned his draft card during the Vietnam war and his hobbies include torturing fetuses..."

My thanks for the reminder of something we too easily forget: the Republicans recognize that there are some groups whom it is just plain wrong to torture.

Something humorous, but lingering

2005-11-20T20:38:00.000-08:00

with either boiling oil or melted lead.

But since I can't administer the proper retribution to spambots, I'm reduced to installing the clever Turing keyword test on comments.

Set the goddam increment bit!

2005-11-13T22:24:00.000-08:00

Despite the title, no deep technoid stuff here. If you've read this far, read on. This is too good to be true, almost:

By now everyone has heard about the worm that Sony put on a bunch of its plain audio CDs, which installs itself invisibly in the Windows kernel via some nice security hole that Microsoft left for such purposes. And everyone has heard how within a couple of days of the announcement some malware writers had started circulating stuff that exploited the Sony exploit to get their own evil stuff into Windows in a way that's next to impossible to delete.

Hmm, I said no technoid stuff, didn't I? Gimme a break; the press handles stories like this every day.

All right, the code that Sony installs on your XP system, designed to ~~protect their copyright~~ prevent you from exercising legitimate rights under copyright law is a copyright violation! Thanks to Rachel for this one. There is code in Sony's little production that's identical to code in LAME, an open-source mp3 encoder.

Open source? Doesn't that mean it's OK to use the code? Yes; everyone is free to use it in accord with the terms of the license under which it's distributed. That's the Gnu Lesser General Public License, and it requires, as they clearly explain in their documentation, that you must give them due credit, provide a link back to their website, and make your modifications to their code available under the GNU license. Want to guess how much of this Sony has done?

It appears that if copyright law is worth anything, Sony, having simply lifted the code without any compliance with license terms, is subject to a nasty lawsuit. To be sure, Gnu's GPL has not yet been tested in court. When do we start? Where's the signup sheet for backers for legal expenses?

Speaking of GPL: Thirty-some years ago, I worked for a company called Information Systems Design, which at one point was involved in one of the first publicized cases of theft of software, and the first application of a new California law on theft of trade secrets. We were the good guys, of course. A competitor who couldn't solve a problem that one of our guys had figured out took a simpler approach: steal our code. We found out; the cops and the Santa Clara County D.A. were quite happy to take on the first test case for the new criminal law; they got a warrant and staged a raid, with technical ssistance from us.

I'd love to tell the full tale, including the first broad search warrant to search all of a computer installation's magnetic storage, and how the story suddenly broke into international fame through a headline in the Chronicle; but I'm too lazy right now. And this isn't supposed to get tech-heavy.

But one thing we had to prove in court, naturally, was that the code they had was actually stolen from us and wasn't an independent solution to the same problem. (The LAME people will have the same problem, which they can easily solve because there is plenty of stuff visible on Sony's CDs which resembles their code in ways that can't possibly be coincidental.) So the competitor's code was examined by the author of our code, to look for excessive resemblances, of which he found plenty. One example that got into the court records concerned a line from which he had at an early stage omitted an essential asterisk, causing the code not to work properly. Finding the error, he had gone back and fixed it. And as he did so, Greg Lutz (who used his initials GPL on his code submissions -- how's that for uncanny?) added this comment.

SET THE GODDAM INCREMENT BIT

Oddly enough, the same comment appeared verbatim in the other guys' code. The perp copped a plea, and we won our lawsuit.

Kansas? Again?

2005-11-09T22:57:00.000-08:00

Kansas puts us in touch with the eternal verities. Like, what goes around comes around.. Like, if you put a stupid topical joke on your website and never update anything, after a while it's topical again.

Are seven syllables really enough?

2005-11-07T00:50:00.000-08:00

Dadahead has a post on Andy Rooney and Don Imus talking about "black" and "African American". I have no real problem with his conclusions, and no idea of defending R & I; but there's more to be said.

First off, people are in fact trying to tell me (along with Rooney and Imus) how I ought to use my native language. Many people object to being told that kind of thing. They are wrong; but not quite completely wrong.

People have a right, within some limits, to decide what they are to be called. When Clive Staples Lewis, aged 7 or so, declares that from now on he is Jack, the members of his family go along with it; and for the rest of his life he is Jack to all his friends. (Sure beats Clive, even though he was not named after the imperialist.)

And if an identifiable group makes a collective decision on what it's to be called -- you know it's identifiable because it is identified by some name or other -- that decision is to be heeded, other things being equal or nearly so. There will be objections at this point that "collective decision" is impossible and oxymoronic. Strictly speaking, yes, it's impossible, but I know one when I see one.

I saw one in the 1960s. When I learned the English language, the word Negro was used in my part of the world by decent people , by which I mean people who were not overtly racist, did not want to be racist, and did not like racism, however far they may have been from the impossible dream of really being free from racism. There were other words, to be sure.

One word was not used, and that's that. (It's rather an open secret that the word is used in ceratin contexts by members of the group. That's their privilege. This annoys a lot of stupid whiny honkies -- I claim the privilege of using that term -- but to hell with them.)

There was "colored". I'm not quite sure what was wrong with it, but it was not what one used. I think it seemed rather patronizing and euphemistic. Euphemistic? You mean there's something wrong with being [black/Negro/colored]? Of course not; it sounds as if the speaker thinks there's something wrong with it: that's the patronizing part. But I don't insist on the point.

There was also "black". Sounded a bit dubious. Makes one think of Little Black Sambo. And let's please not get into whether Sambo must have been Indian if he dealt with tigers, if only because that will remind us to start fighting about the terminology for the descendants of the the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, exluding Eskimos, oooooops, Inuit. Anyway, it didn't sound right to me.

And then in the '60s there was a rather sudden collective decision, I know one when I see one, to make a change. From then on, the word was to be "Black". Jules Feiffer did a typically funny sarcastic treatment of Black, and it was right, but in the long run irrelevant. And it seemed to me that rather a lot of the older generation of Negroes did not like the new name much more than I did, but they saw which way things were going, and fighting about it was not what they needed, and they swallowed their discomfort. (I could be all wrong about that, and I certainly have no authority here, but so it seemed to me at the time.)

And I went along, of course, because people have a right to choose what they are called, within some limits of reason, and all the more so when they've been taking inconceivable amounts of shit for hundreds of years. And by golly, pretty soon Black sounded right. And in not too many years, Negro actually sounded a bit embarrassing.

And now we come to "African American", with or without a hyphen. Someone is telling me that I ought to change my vocabulary again, and I am to decide whether to do it this time.

To begin with, I've already changed once, by request. Are names to be changed every so often, with the season's fashions? Right, that's an old guy's sort of argument, and the young and flexible people may well want to make the change immediately. (They, of course, would be making it for the first time.) And it's a small sort of request to make of one's friends and family; if my cousin, whose legal birth-certificate name I had almost forgotten at one time, told me that her first name was changing again from the one that I've used almost all our lives, it would change, blood being thicker than water. But it takes a bit more presumption to keep shaping the vocabulary of millions of strangers.

And just who is telling me? I do not sense the consensus that I did 40 years go, or anything like it. I could be wrong, but I don't see it.

And I am expected to change a good solid forceful one-syllable English word to a nasty heptasyllabic compound, no more sensible or meaningful than the thoroughly inaccurate "black". I don't see the purpose. Or rather, I do see the political purpose, and I disagree with it.

Dadahead says that "African American" signals that you are trying to be sensitive about these things, and that's true and good. He says that it offends no one; in effect, that it's neutral. I disagree on that. Aha! I found something to disagree with, justifying the existence of this posting.

The Poetry Corner

2005-10-20T00:16:00.000-07:00

Grand Moff Texan is rising to new poetic heights in response to the current pony-fest. With a bit of formatting for clarification:

This is what's left of the right. [Already a good line!]
They're willing to sneak around and slit throats in the night,
but they don't have the guts for a straight up fight.

Can they draw a goose, too?

2005-10-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

Again, bottleofblog sends me to an important story, this on the chilling letter from the Number 2 man in Al Qaeda.

Bottle, after guaranteeing that the reader of the letter will remain so unchilled as practically to be sweaty, comments on the remarkable number of number-2 men Al Qaeda has.

I'm mainly reminded of Robert Benchley.

This letter is so chilling, says the story, because of how "calm, clear, and well argued" it is. Isn't it remarkable? A senior leader at Al Qaeda can write a letter clearly! And "Isn't It Remarkable?" was the title of the essay Benchley wrote when he encountered a picture captioned "Remarkably Accurate and Artistic Painting of a Goose from Pharoah Akhenaten's Palace, Drawn 3300 Years Ago." Benchley asked why it was remarkable: "Why should we be surprised that the people who built the Pyramids could also draw a goose so that it looked like a goose?"

Benchley's sobering essay (or chilling?) should be read, for balance, along with his "Lucky World!" which begins, "When you come to think of it, the wonder is not that there are so many jammed automobile fenders, bad motion pictures, sore throats, divorces and wars, but that there aren't more of them." Both are in My Ten Years in a Quandary, Harper & Bros, 1936 (lots of reprints, cheap at abebooks.

Another hero gone

2005-10-15T18:10:00.000-07:00

Vivian Jones; R. I. P. Thanks to bottleofblog. Apologies for pointing people to so much bad language lately; but bottle's caption to her picture should be in textbooks to illustrate the distinction between indecorous and disrespectful.

Paradise Lost, the Movie

2005-10-15T00:31:00.000-07:00

No, really.
Or should that be John Milton's Paradise Lost as with Frankenstein?
But what you must not miss is the comments. Unless (spoiler) you just don't care about David Mamet.

Hoping Tom Lehrer saw the item

2005-10-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

Great news. There is now a proper explanation for short gamma-ray bursts. In case you missed out, these are short bursts of high-energy radiation from somewhere in the sky, which satellite devices started picking up several years ago; the atmosphere blocks the gamma radiation from getting down here. While it's flashing ("short" means less than two seconds), a burst is as bright as 100 quadrillion Suns.

BTW, this is the second time in a couple of days that I've seen a number like "100,000 trillion". What gives? Thousand million and million million have passed pretty well out of the language, especially since England decided to join Germany and the USA in defining billion and trillion, eliminating a possible ambiguity. Can it be that the reader isn't expected to know what a quadrillion is? Answer, I suppose: Until recently, trillions were something a person just hadn't heard of, except perhaps in the number of miles in a light-year; the latter was usually called six million million miles when I first heard the number, fifty-some years ago (finding the locution annoying even then). What with GDPs and national debts and national budgets, not to mention big amounts of money denominated in Yen, trillions are now considered familiar enough to use, but it will be a few years before even the US war budget hits a quadrillion Yen.

Oh, right, you want to know what does cause these things. Colliding neutron stars, according to the paper coming out today in Nature. (Subscription required, of course.) There's a mind-blowing thought. Also, a good name for a rock group.

It has been known for some time that these big explosions were a long way off. Good thing. If one happened in our galaxy, and the beam of gamma radiation happened to point our way, it could knock out the ozone layer completely, causing us all to be fried with short-wave unltraviolet from our friendly neighborhood Sun. Unlikely, however, so "don't buy gamma ray burst insurance," says Edward "Rocky" Kolb of Fermilab.

Besides,

No one will have the endurance
To collect on his insurance,
Lloyd's of London will be loaded when they go.

Not Fine, thank you

2005-10-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

Magnificent is better than Important. We no longer do Fine.
--Overheard at Christies: the official hermeneutics of the titles given to auctions.

He lies like an eyewitness

2005-08-21T03:40:00.000-07:00

The late Professor Bergen Evans of Northwestern University wrote two debunking books in the 1950s, The Natural History of Nonsense and The Spoor of Spooks, both of which will repay reading after 50 years. Too early for von Daeniken and spoon bending, but those are kind of out of date by now anyway, aren't they? But astrology and psi powers and misconceptions of history and law go on forever; and Evans will show you how little change there is in Things of Permanent Value like these.

When speaking of law and evidence, Evans cites a saying that he says is common among police and lawyers: "He lies like an eyewitness." Unless I am getting it all wrong (impossible, as I'm getting the information from The Guardian), we have a truly classic case concerning the man recentlly executed in London for the crime of Looking As If You Might Be Muslim.

(Now I'm the one that's lying. The soldier who was on stakeout classified him as White when he saw him leave the building. In a picture in The Observer today (21 Aug, but I can't find it on the website) he looks as Muslim or Asian (not to say African, which the actual suspect was) as I do. But at the time we thought that was part of his crime.)

We all knew how he was wearing unreasonably bulky clothes in warm weather; it looked as if there were wires and things sticking out of the clothes; he ran into the station pursued by numerous heavily-armed police and jumped the barrier, as the cops also did, sensibly enough; and so on.

I suspect, from a conversation or two, that the English, with their tradition of law-abiding police, do not fully grasp the distinction between running away from a real policeman wearing a friendly Bobby-helmet and running from a couple of armed goons, looking like anybody else or worse, who may or may not identify themselves verbally as being on the payroll of a police organization and may or not be speaking the truth. There will be plenty more opportunities to learn; September 11 has changed everything. But in the July accounts of the matter, there was no mistaking that these guys were Government; at least, if you are used to a country in which large gangs of heavily armed men are not the norm.

This week we learned that that story was a lie from beginning to end. One bit was related to the truth: after walking calmly into the station and stopping to pick up a free newspaper, he ran for the train. To be sure, we know that no Englishman would do that, but he was, alas, an Illegal Alien who didn't know better. Right.

All Americans understand this: the story was the standard set of police lies to cover up a criminal dereliction of duty. Well, all Americans who aren't complete drooling idiots. Nothing new here, except that this was maybe beyond the expected American norm for police malfeasance. And maybe that gives us an excuse, along with a general trust in British legal institutions, for our believing the whole story and interpreting the incident in terms of it.

But wait! Here comes the surprise: it was not a police fabrication. It was the eyewitness account of one Christopher Wells (along with one or two others), who was right there on the train and saw it all with completely unbiased eyes. (You'll have to read down to near the end of the story to find this.)

The officials in London are thinking hard about the case, and may come up with better solutions to operational control of these dangerous operations, and even to a problem which they had quite brilliantly kept irrelevant for a copule of centuries, how to manage trigger-happy cops. The rest of us can relearn a lesson about eyewitness accounts rendered by whatever self-aggrandizing fabulist may have happened to be on the site.

Oh, and Mr. Wells should call some Yank talk-radio site, which will surely be glad to give him a hero's tour of Red-State America.

The very last Terry Schiavo item

2005-07-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

One should let the poor woman die and rest. Yes. And that is done.

But the case--is that laid to rest? Not yet: Governor Voodoo-Medicine so loved it that he brought it back for one more bow as a zombie. Now you've seen the news stories about how his Attorney General has dropped the case, and that's all. Isn't it?

Do you really think you can bury one of the Undead without bothering to put the stake through its heart? Out of boredom and perhaps even decency, the respectable media are trying to do that. But maybe the thing will stay buried longer if people see what the AG said. Thanks to JRH (and thanks to Shakespeare's Sister for pointing me to his blog), you can read the handwriting on the stake.

I'd take exception to JRH's description of the tone, which he says sounds like a lecture. The affect of the piece (as we 18th-century music types like to say) is not pure academic exposition; it is exasperation. Here you can find out how, if you are a lawyer holding a responsible office, speaking with dignity and coherence and full backing of evidence, you pronounce B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.

Moratorium?

2005-07-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum made a very decent and reasonable suggestion that all the blogosphere should lay off the politicking, the "political point scoring over the London attacks. Just for a day." Other good people followed.

Dadahead thinks otherwise, that politics is not a parlor game, but a matter of life and death. He's right. Of course the Right came out running in all directions and screaming political obscenities, and that would make it harder to behave oneself; but that's not the point.

'Politics' is, for most of us, simply the practice of critically analyzing the most important issues of our time. Asking us to put aside politics for the day is tantamount to calling for a moratorium on rational thought.

Which, of course, is precisely what the Right would like, and precisely what they got in the aftermath of 9/11.

It's not too early, though, to think about what one will do the next time. Here is a modest proposwal that would show respect for the dead and for the living. For one day, anyway: No gloating; no invective; no demonstrating how your favorite irrelevant issue is proved by the day's unpleasant events; no clever jokes, please.

The rules naturally do not apply so strictly to those who are there and suffering. And the one about jokes doesn't apply at all to Londoners, God bless 'em, who, it's said, were coming up with jokes two hours after the bombs went off.

Back here where nobody's getting hurt, Debra Saunders, our own aspiring Michelle Malkin clone, really rose to the occasion. Read it yourself if you're a masochist. Her general idea is that if the people who bomb Planned Parenthood offices and murder doctors were to do something this bad to us, we Liberals would can all this dumb civil liberties stuff and understanding-the-reasons, and we'd go and hang us some Christians from the nearest lamppost. At least, that's what's implied by her knowledge that we'd have the sense to go out and kill somebody who's somehow vaguely or tenuously or fictitiously connected with the crime, the way she wants to do and George does. Perhaps she's mistaken.

So you can tell, the day is over. Now I want to ask anyone who has the stomach to follow these things: did someone, somewhere on the Right, say anything decent yesterday? There is a sort of Anglophilia that's obligatory in the respectable Right, after all; so, was anyone at the National Review, or a Boston brahmin who speaks only to Cabots or possibly to God, or a pillar of the Eastern prep schools, or any of the people who love Winston Churchill not only for saving civilization but for trying to preserve the Empire in India and upholding the Gold Standard, moved to express himself about England, and London, even before thinking what a good time it would be to buy on the market's downtick or writing about how it all proved that Liberals are evil?

Lefties who have no use for aristocracy or empire were moved to express themselves about the sceptered isle with Shakespeare's help, or on their own (see below). Surely some Righties did the same; I'd be glad to hear about it.

Meanwhile, are the terrorists getting it wrong? New York is not the first place to choose if you want to imtimidate people or drive them to despair. Lots of media action, but quite disappointing effects as to toppling New York. Or London! The Blitz (42,000 dead) and the past 30 years of terrorism from their own archipelago: a great prospect for demoralization and chaos there.

And I can't write Madrilenos without hearing:
Madrid, qué bien resistes,
Madrid, qué bien resistes,
Madrid, qué bien resistes,
mamita mía,
los bombardeos.
los bombardeos.

De las bombas se ríen,
de las bombas se ríen,
de las bombas se ríen,
mamita mía,
los madrileños.
los madrileños.

Well, they didn't laugh at the bombs in Madrid; but there's something about these cities that's hard to beat down. (Text is from "Los Cuatro Generales", song from the Spanis Civil War.)

Something rather different

2005-07-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

Would someone like to recommend a blog-consolidator other than Bloglines? I am damn well sick of seeing their freakin Bloglines Plumber. If they can't afford a backup system or just can't make their software work for two or three days at a time, I'm willing to pay [gasp] for someone who can do it.

Exploding flypaper

2005-07-07T17:14:00.000-07:00

In case it's not immediately obvious, the title refers to the Flypaper Theory, under which we're drawing the enemy into Iraq where we wipe them out and keep them from attacking us here at home (sorry about that, Iraqis, but at least we're safe).

The best I can say to the horror is what Billmon said over at This Modern World:
"We are all New Yorkers, we are all Madrilenos, we are all Baghdadis. But I was a Londoner from the time I learned how to read. I know it shouldn't make any difference, but it does."

Meanwhile, the discontent of the American people with the war was leading, even before the failure of the great Presidential bucking-up speech and its lukewarm reception by the soldiers, to more speculation about Vietnam. I was reading in the last 24 hours about the historical parallels, and how the Tipping Point for public opinion (not policy, of course) was reached suddenly with the Tet Offensive: the enemy made a hugely successful attack which the public knew was simply impossible because we had been making such progress; and the game was up. Later, the authorities managed to prove the TO was a failure; an exercise in irrelevancy that's a candidate for Guinness.

The Iraqi insurgents, or resistance, certainly can't duplicate such an offensive now, as the commentators were saying. So the Tipping Point will be reached more gradually.

Or something.

Le quatre juillet. Please rise and sing the Marseillaise

2005-07-04T00:38:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows how France financed our Revolution, which could not possibly have succeeded without money to buy esssential supplies, particularly gunpowder.

When I say everyone, I mean, of course, at least half a dozen people in each state. Each of the larger Blue states.

But I had failed to notice, till I read a review of Lavoisier in the Year One by Madison Smartt Bell, who it was that provided that gunpowder. After some embarrassments in the Seven Years' War (which we call the French and Indian War), France decided to expand its gunpowder-making facilities by applying the latest Enlightenment science. The new production came on-line in time to supply the Americans, thanks to its director : Antoine Lavoisier.

Well, this republic, at least, had need of savants; and on this day we should thank him of whom (according to the apocryphal story) the French one decided it had no need.

Nations, of course, never do good things for entirely pure motives. France did not support our revolution out of devotion to Enlightenment ideals of Liberty, whether those of Locke or of Voltaire et al; nor out of fondness for the British colonists, their recent enemies on the North American continent where the French empire suffered such a disastrous loss. It wanted to weaken the British, that's all. Nor need we overlook that the money provided for purchase of powder went right back to France to buy powder, setting the classic pattern for 20th-century American foreign aid.

Then, as to repaying our debt to France (people really did use that phrase once upon a time), the United States did not come running to save European civilization in 1914 and 1939, but held out, as our English friends never tire of telling us, for years in the First war, and until the other guys declared war on us in the Second.

But, T. S. Eliot or none, there is something to be said for eventually doing the right thing if your reasons aren't entirely wrong. Some people who were also France did love Liberty; and the US got around to doing some damn fine things in Europe when it got around to it. (Shall we just forget Versailles? No one comes out a winner there. Well, maybe John Maynard Keynes.)

Jacques Chirac is said to have had very naughty profit-seeking motives in 2002-2003; but in fact the French made a serious effort to stop our government from pursuing a disastrous military adventure based entirely on the most dubious grounds, except for those grounds that were not even dubious. They failed; had their hearts been pure enough to give them the strength of ten, they still would have failed; but they seriously tried. Today I'll raise a toast to them; maybe I'll save the Marseillaise till the 14th when I run a video of Casablanca.

A master of meiosis

2005-07-03T21:50:00.000-07:00

Lord Peter Wimsey, sensing that a break is needed in the growing tension among the group in his parlor, calls for liquid refreshment all around, even though it's still morning. Offering some sherry to Miss Twitterton, he quiets her protestations about taking a drink at that time by assuring her, "you will find it as mild as your own parsnip wine."

The new-wedded lord then gives a glass to Lady Peter, who has also sampled that lady's parsnip wine, and who comments, sotto voce, "You are a master of meiosis."

In case any of the rabid evolutionists should stop by, let me note that meiosis is "a figure of speech by which the impression is intentionally conveyed that a thing is less in size, importance,etc., that it really is"; also, a synonym for litotes. And the meaning goes a long way back before biology latched onto it. (Cf. ellipsis, parable, and hyperbole.)

In other news, Russia and China had a friendly summit meeting and issued a friendly communiqué decrying monopoly and domination in world politics and calling for an end to "attempts to divide nations into leaders and those being led." This, coming from Russia and China, is as hilarious as is the idea of long-term cooperation between those two imperial powers. But hey, a politician's gotta do what a politician's gotta do.

The hilarity dies down when you contemplate the specific issues on which they pledge cooperation against unnamed hegemonists' evil interference: Chechnya and Taiwan.

But the commentators bring the fun back. At the New Eurasia Foundation in Moscow, Andrei Kortunov tells us that the statement means that Russia and China "don't quite believe the sincerity of the second Bush administration's attempts to break its image of being a proponent of unilateral actions and decisions." As if that weren't enough, he adds that "This may be connected with the unilateral actions of Washington in the Middle East, its latest decisions on increasing its defense budget and some others."

A master of meiosis.

Requiem for an airhead

2005-07-01T23:23:00.000-07:00

Bill Kaysing, who originated the hoax that the Moon landings were a hoax, is dead. Has been for months, but it was just announced. The Bad Astronomy blog has a report that has an interesting take: in addition to being a gentleman who observes de mortuis nil nisi bonum, the BABlogger finds that that abominable bit of work has had good side effects in getting many people interested in the reality of the Apollo program.

Read the comments, too. It's a bit of a shock to see how many people testify to their own birth or rebirth of interest thanks to Kaysing et al. Even more of a hoot: when a comment finally treats the old fraud as roughly as he deserves, it's by a Canadian! Sorry about the stereotyping, and happy Canada Day; Porlock Senior didn't take out Canadian citizenship for nothing.

The truth about blogging

2005-07-01T22:47:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen this already, but if not, Leiter Reports now has the real story on blogs, persuasion, and invective.

I cling to the hope that it may be right not to agree 100% with his view. There is always the chance that some person who isn't already a partisan might drop by and possibly be persuaded. Or maybe not, in blogs. More likely in newsgroups, and I'm well aware of what I'm saying when I say that.

Thomas Jefferson and C. S. Lewis both wrote of the uncertain nature of persuasion; and they were talking about the reactions of reasonable people. I think John Locke did also, though I doubt I could ever find the quote.

But hey, as long as persuasion is such a completely uncertain business, why not just blast away at the idiots and criminals and not worry about wounding the feelings of innocents who happen by? There are hard questions and easy questions, as Leiter says. So off I go to indulge my current favorite guilty pleasure, the Rude Pundit.

Update: Been hearing enough lately about how Baghdad is just like Houston? Oops, I wouldn't want someone to read a hidden attack on Houston into that; we pundits just mean Baghdad has this crime rate that's not so bad compared to this or that US city. Now, with a tip of the hat to Leiter again, read what the United States government says about vehicular travel in Iraq.

Look down, look down

2005-06-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

and see my pretty little blog formatted decently again. Thanks to Zachary for getting me off dead center.

was:

that lonesome road, and you'll find my text.

Blogspot seems to have mucked up something. I'm not the only one whose text has suddenly been forced down below the sidebar. Meanwhile I need to keep assigning new dates to this silly text to keep it on top.

Reader, if you require a foreign policy disaster,

2005-06-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

look about you, or to the South.

Latin America: our own backyard. Latin America: an official exclusive United States sphere of influence for 180 years. Latin America--

Without Denis DeKat's pointer, how long would it have been before I knew how stunningly the boggle-headed klunks in charge of telling the rest of the world what to do have been screwing up in that obscure little backwater of the modern world?(Less than 90 miles from home!) Read it and barf. Then cheer. They are simply losing this one, and there's no army available to invade anybody about it.

But seriously, folks

2005-06-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

RangelMD, an actual physician, not just playing one on TV or in the Senate, gives us this:

"I'd like to close this evening speaking more as a physician than as a United States Senator and really speak to my involvement as a physician and -- and as a Senator and as leader in the United States Senate in what has been a fascinating course of events for us over the last 48 hours."
As someone who identified themselves and emphasized their role as a physician Dr. Frist broke several ethical rules that March day. He claimed to make a diagnosis on a patient without directly examining her or reading her medical records. He did not make or keep any formal patient record of his medical evaluation of this case. He gave his professional opinion on a patient who resides in a state where he has no license to practice medicine. He misused his professional opinion (as officially entered into the Congressional record) and abused and misrepresented his stature as a licensed physician for the purposes of influencing a major legislative body during debate on pending legislation.

Read the rest for his case that Frist needs to lose his medical license.

If that gets you down, cheer up with the comments at Orac, where I picked this up. Sorry, I have to quote one comment here, from Ron Sullivan: "I did not have diagnosis with that woman."

The Hitler Zombie

2005-06-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

"When you compare your opponent to Hitler, you demean your opponent, you demean yourself, and you demean Hitler."
--Jon Stewart

Today Orac defends his position on the brain-eating Hitler zombie. You don't have to have read the post he's defending, much less disagree with the point Durbin was trying to make (Orac doesn't), in order to benefit from reading it.

Nor is there any real need to parse that sentence and figure out who is on which side.

I wonder if the zombie is related to the worm in the brain, discovered by Richard Mitchell in Less Than Words Can Say, which devours the part of the brain that governs the use of the active voice, and thereby causes a move into administrative jobs. How do you analyze a zombie's DNA?

How to write a spoof

2005-06-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's ruminations by the head of the ~~CYA~~CIA remind me to look for historical precedent. Before getting to the point, here are the history and the generalities.

Mark Twain wrote a number of outrageous hoaxes, or satires, depending on how you take them. In his early days in Nevada, he reported a bloody multiple murder that shocked everyone in town, since they didn't notice details such as that the man who murdered his family was a well-known bachelor. And there was the Petrified Man, described in great detail, with some obvious impossibilities in the geography, and the small matter that he was petrified in the position of thumbing his nose.

Then, later, there was a wonderfully stuffy and humorless British review of A Tramp Abroad, which the discerning reader (like, ahem, me at age 16) could see was written by Twain himself. (I think it was an utterly Twainish deadpan "This is surely an exaggeration" that provided what we now call the Tipping Point.) It got a lot of attention, including some from smart people who told Twain that it was a fake, and he had been taken in. They had a hard time accepting the obvious truth when told about it.

Anyway, Twain always played fair, sorta, putting in something outrageous enough to make it clear that the whole thing was false, provided you were paying attention. That was the problem with the massacre, as Twain later perceived it: it was so lurid and shocking that no one had his brain turned on while reading it.

The recent creationist manifesto might be real, and it might be a hoax to expose the profound ignorance of a supposed expert on the creationist side. By the Mark Twain rules, it ought to be a fake, but you can't be sure when you don't know anything about the author: this kind of thing is perfectly possible among sincere creationists, as you can see from the PhD who expressed herself as unsure that it was for real, but was favorably inclined.

So, Porter Goss of the CYA says that he knows where Bin Laden is. Then, to make sure we understand in what sense he is saying that, he adds in true Mark Twain fashion that we can't just go in and get him because of "our sense of international obligation, fair play."

Emergency alert

2005-06-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already got in on this one, don't delay. It is now just about 5 AM in England, where this absolutely fabulous idiot lives. (You want the deranged protest item, not the Mallard Fillmore wannabe comic.) Pretty soon he'll get up and find the (188 and climbing) comments that nice polite people have made about the intellect of a commentator on American politics who thinks that Fred Phelps is a commie pacifist leftist. And probably the stuff will be removed, hence the hurry.

Tip of the hat to Pharyngula.

Helping the war effort

2005-06-20T01:30:00.000-07:00

Jesus' General has organized an effort to support our troops by supplying reinforcements, now that Army recruiting is way down, from the ranks of the highly educated and patriotic Young Republicans. For some reason or other, he has adopted a logo of a Yellow Elephant.

They now have the first report from one of the special operatives. I do recommend looking at it. The Young Repugnants' level of politicial seriousness and sophistication, let alone their patriotism, must be seen to be believed. (Oh, and if the YR correspondence turns out to be a hoax, it's a far better and nastier one than the creationist maybe-hoax I just wrote up.)

Any sufficiently advanced technology...

2005-06-18T23:46:00.000-07:00

...is indistinguishable from black magic -- so said Arthur C. Clarke. I think it's a lot less profound, and a lot less true, than lots of other people do. Much better is

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from creationism."

That's Stuart Weinstein in a comment at Panda's Thumb on a truly awful farrago of creationist pseudo-science.

I think, and it would be interesting to hear whether I'm right, that a person with no great science background would see from the tone of the thing that it's not to be taken seriously. What's sobering is that the lady who presents this anonymously contributed theory claims to have a PhD in molecular biology. What do they teach the children in school these days? In my day, let me tell you, you couldn't get a BA in biology from a self-respecting school without knowing enough elementary physics to spot at least a few of the howlers in the piece.

It's suggested that she is a hoaxer, but evidence is presented to the contrary. Probably the piece isn't her work but was sent to her as she says. The jury is out on whether the thing is a hoax, but I'm confident that Alan Sokal didn't write it. The science nonsense in his famous hoax was much more subtle.

By the way, if you don't see what's so mind-blowingly bad about the so-called science, there's nothing wrong with you, assuming you don't claim to have any kind of science degree or to be doing any kind of science whatever. People have different interests and different specialties. Still, from my own limited knowledge of the Humanities, let me ask how you would react to an essay proving that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare's plays, written by someone who confuses Ben Jonson with Samuel Johnson and believes that the Metaphysical Poets were friends of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Terry Gilliam is so conventional

2005-06-16T00:18:00.000-07:00

But Hell, he never had material like this. Thanks to Denis DeKat.

The problems of compassion

2005-06-14T23:12:00.000-07:00

Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion, is often depicted in Tibetan tradition as having eleven (11) heads. Three stacks of three, facing forward and left and right, another one on top, and another, different, one atop that.

Here's the reason: He reflected on the fact that no matter how many creatures he helped, there would always be more. He reflected on it till his head exploded.

Just thought you'd like to know.

But his spritual father Amitabha Buddha took the ten pieces and fashioned ten heads, then gave him one of his own to keep the whole thing straight.

However, when Avalokiteshvara got to China, he had only one head, and he's called Guanyin, and he's female.

I am not making any of this up.

Sometimes you can learn a lot by just watching. One of the things I've watched is the new Tibet exhibit at the Asian Art Museum here.

They hate our freedom

2005-06-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

From Lance Mannion:

You know what they like to say about the terrorists? "They hate us for our freedom."

Well, that's why the Right hates the Left these days. We aren't as afraid as they are.

They hate us for our freedom from fear.

I'm not kidding!

2005-06-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

Any blog that has a picture of the Campanile in its header has to be looked at. Even if the author has a bit of trouble spelling it and even if he describes himself as moderate. After all, what's moderation in Berkeley?

And without Bounded Rationality I might never have found the true story, science news category, that's better than the story that's too good to be true. So here it is, not the physiological basis of the conscience, but the physiological basis of sarcasm.

Security

2005-05-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal ran a story the other day (May 26, 2005) about what various companies, but particularly FedEx, are doing in cooperation with investigations into potential terrorist actions and other things. I shall attempt to report the main points here, without comment or evaluation.

To save verbiage, I'll use a couple of words in a special sense. Demand: to call for information in a way backed by legal sanctions, as in a warrant issued by authority of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution or by such other authority as the Executive or Legislative branch may from time to time invent. Request: to call for information on other grounds, such as friendliness to law enforcement or a possible quid pro quo.

FedEx takes its cooperation very seriously. It has a special computer link to Homeland Security, via which its employees are encouraged to send information on suspicious activities. The program for information gathering is based on the TIPS program which was proposed by John Ashcroft in 2002 but was not put in place.

Fedex responds freely to requests for information. It shares its database on international shipments with Customs and the Border Patrol, not merely upon request, but by simply granting access to the databases. The information includes credit card data, which the government normally has some difficulty getting; in fact, it can't ask for such information except in connection with a criminal investigation.

Sending a package by FedEx involves a contract that gives the company the right to inspect the contents at its sole discretion. In cases of suspicious activity, it uses this power in cooperation with Federal authorities, who lack such authority on their own.

FedEx also has a privately owned police force, formally recognized as a police force by the state of Tennessee, which takes part in regional security planning. It is FedEx policy to look for two-way sharing of information with the government.

The Journal also summarizes the policies of several other organizations.

The United States Postal Service is forbidden by law to open first-class mail (including, I suppose, Priority Mail, which is the same thing for packages) or to divulge shipping or payment information without a proper warrant or court order. Current USPS policy, so far as is known, is to comply with the law.

United Parcel Service likewise provides information only in response to a demand made according to law or regulations.

America On-Line maintains a hot line for law-enforcement requests for subscriber information. It also gives advice on how to word subpoenas.

Western Union cooperates fully in providing information about overseas money transfers.

OnStar, the General Motors emergency system, which necessarily knows where its customers are, considers such data to be confidential; it releases the data only in response to a warrant.

That about wraps up the summary. The conclusions you draw are your own. It may be worth your while to seek out the details in the paper, which is available right now in any public library in America.

Upon rereading the Evil Overlord List

2005-05-23T01:17:00.000-07:00

Like, it's not exactly new. But perhaps Peter's List is more conprehensive than the one I filed from rec.humor.funny, so I had never run into a version that contained this advice. Or maybe it's just that John Bolton is in the news these days.

55. The deformed mutants and odd-ball psychotics will have their place in my Legions of Terror. However before I send them out on important covert missions that require tact and subtlety, I will first see if there is anyone else equally qualified who would attract less attention.

Sunday morning

2005-05-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Apologia: Parts of the following may sound rather like the work of a Christian. I make no such claim, but I have read some writers who were able to show that the theology has a deep and disturbing logic to it; I write in the spirit of pursuing that logic, without insisting on the truth or falsity of its premises.

The Chron these days seems to arranging an orderly spin-off of its Sunday morning political section ("Insight") to the Hoover Institute. Today they lead off with some guy, non-Hoover I admit, and his road to Damascus on which he finally perceives the evil of the Left in that they refuse to have unquestioning faith in the Iraq elections. Advance work has been in progress for some time under Debra Saunders, the Chron's own home-grown Buckley, who actually gets something right occasionally, just to keep us off guard.

Today Saunders really doesn't like the Sith movie. OK, I don't expect to like it either, should I ever see it. Regardless, I might as well glance at what she says, which might not be just another "Ooooh, anti-Bush propaganda" rant; and it isn't; not wholly.

I wonder if she'll hear from the Christian activists about this column. It seems the series went wrong at the end of Episode VI, where Darth Vader turns. He was a terrible, terrible man, and here he just turns around and repents. She seems to have something against the very notion of repentance and redemption. True, in the last minutes of this action-packed adventure movie, we don't get any theological complexity; more to the point, we don't see any Purgatory or any such process of suffering for Vader's sins; but I'm not sure where God granted us the right to see everything that goes on. (Can Saunders really tame the wild bull?) She could argue, though, that this was a long long time ago, before the Incarnation, so he can't really have been redeemed by the Redeemer. Unless you allow, like Mark Twain and C. S. Lewis, that the Redeemer may have decided to act in other times and places than this one -- without even telling us about it, how arrogant!

I've often wondered about those who think that people must go to Hell if they lived in a time and place where they couldn't hear of Jesus: how do they account for Moses and the prophets rising up to go the other way? And those Hebrew worthies supposedly were saved even though they (not to mention Saints Peter and Paul) seem to have had no sufficiently clear understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, without which no man can be saved. (Saint Athanasius made a little misprint there: he meant to say no theologian can be saved.)

A little background here. This morning I came to kitchen carrying the Sunday papers, to find that the sun was streaming into the room through the green leaves outside, it was warm and pleasant, and before going downstairs Ms Four Sigma had laid the table nicely and put suitable Sunday-morning music on. I entered, in fact, to hear Jeffrey Thomas (tenor and conductor) singing "Ach Herr, lehre uns bedenken, dass wir sterben muessen." "Oh Lord, teach us to remember that we must die." Such a sense of timing, she has. (The text is from Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit, one of my great favorites; see below.)

So, after making the tea and reading a bit into the paper, I've got into Saunders's column, and I'm thinking about her objection to instant redemption, and at that point the music has gone on to: "Heute wirst du mit mir im Paradies sein." "This day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Now there's timing!

For those of you who came to Bible school late: When Jesus is being crucified between two criminals, one of them asks Jesus to remember him to his Father; the above is what Jesus says to him. Quick work, that redemption stuff. Dorothy L. Sayers added an interesting and very plausible twist to the story: in her version, the thief (a brigand, ruffian, and insurgent) doesn't really Believe; he just sees that this harmless oddity hasn't done anything to call down judicial murder on himself, and the other brigand is bitterly taunting the man, so this one takes pity and says something humane and humoring, even in his agony: it's an act of Charity, rather than belief, and is immediately rewarded. (The Man Born To Be King, 11th play, scene 2, sequence 4; see below.)

Judas, of course, was not redeemed. He regretted but couldn't repent and humble himself: threw the money back at the high priests, hanged himself, and wound up being munched by Satan for eternity. But could he, in some in-principle sense, have repented and confessed and been saved? Where are the limits of salvation? Well, he would have to be a different person. And if he were a different person, he wouldn't -- but hey, I thought we were all corrupt, and not just a little bit. So it's sort of a hard debate to settle. But I like, again, Sayers's take:

"...Is God merciful? Can He forgive? . . . What help is that? -- Jesus would forgive. If I crawled to the gallows' foot and asked his pardon, he would forgive me -- and my soul would writhe forever under the torment of that forgiveness." And he went and hanged himself. (The Man Born To Be King, 10th play, scene 2.) Much scarier, for my money, than a story of someone who is simply so bad terrible evil that really we don't have to worry about him.

Notes:

The German is from the cantata Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (God's time is the best time of all) by J.S. Bach, BWV 106, performed by American Bach Soloists on Koch 3-7164-2 H1. Fantastic recording. If you can't find it, be sure to go to ABS's website and politely request that they reissue it. (Full disclosure: "that we reissue it.") The CD also has BWV 152 and 161. At least "Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn" (Walk on the road of faith) is a less gloomy subject. Not that Bach was capable of being really gloomy in his music; that, according our grievously missed friend Laurette Goldberg, is why the French have never quite been able to take him seriously. But I digress.

The Man Born To Be King by Dorothy L. Sayers, was a cycle of radio plays, presented on BBC in 1943 or so, in which Bible characters were made to talk and act like human beings. Highly controversial in its time, surprise. Still in print, ISBN 0-89870-307-7

Toast freedom. Or fry it

2005-05-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

When the inventor of Freedom Fries turns apostate, as Zac tells us, things have come to a pretty pass.

This just in, May 28: The same Walter Jones (R-N.C.) was one of the five Republicans who voted for the resolution by our own Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. The total was 300 - 128, which the Independent-Journal calls "only" 128. Well, they're entitled to their opinions.

Empathetic nerves

2005-05-19T00:17:00.000-07:00

Some things are too good to be true, and are still true. What Eisenhower said about mucking with Social Security qualifies well enough, but that's the current Internet Meme, so it can be left to everybody else. Here's another one.

When you're about to do something, certain nerve cells in the brain region called Broca's area will fire; different ones for different actions. No surprise here. Something obviously has to happen in the brain to start off an action.

About ten years ago, it was found that when you watch someone make that same action, some of these same nerve cells fire. Naturally, they're now called mirror neurons. (Neuron, nerve cell, nerve, I can now use them interchangeably if you don't mind.) This is cool: it's a physical basis for empathy, for experiencing what someone else is experiencing; by extension, for why your skin crawls when the tarantula shows up on the pillow next to James Bond.

It gets better: a monkey, watching the action of picking something up, has the same reaction in the corresponding bit of its brain. In fact, that's where the effect was found first.

Broca's area also generates actions in the production of speech. And listening to speech -- back to human subjects now -- starts activity in mirror neurons that are involved in producing speech.

But that's just the beginning. A person might pick up a cup, for instance, in order to drink out of it, or to clear up the table, or for no apparent reason; video clips can set up context that implies one action or another. When you watch the video, the person's intention at the time of starting to pick up the cup affects the set of mirror neurons that fire in your brain. More neurons fire for drinking than for cleaning up; more for cleaning up than for the action with no context.

This is getting almost spooky. Here you have some nerves doing the primitive function of getting a muscular action going, really unintellectual and mechanical; and the way they fire depends on your instant interpretation of what is intended.

And this is where reality goes berserk: monkeys' brains work this way too. Train a monkey to respond to certain cues either by picking up a piece of food and eating it or by picking it up and putting it in a container. Then show it a video of a human hand starting to pick up the food, with one of those cues present. The nerves' response depends on what the person is about to do with the fruit.

To me, this is no less wonderful than Hieronymus Bosch action figures.

All this and more is in an article in the News Focus section of the 13 May 2005 issue of Science; no point giving a link, since you need a membership to read it, and if you have that, you can surely find the item easily. The original work on the monkeys' reaction to people's intentions is in the 26 April issue.

[I wanted to title this The Physiological Bases of the Conscience, to tickle the Lord Peter Wimsey fans; but write a headline like that, and it will look like Science Stuff, which is as attractive to potential readers as publishing a book with footnotes and equations. It's already bad enough to have a blog with no pictures or conversations. So one makes it less obvsiously Science by using a friendly term like empathy, while inserting a quasi-pun with "sympathetic nervous system" that only biology freaks will perceive. BTW did you know that empathy is not in the original edition of the OED? For the adjective, empathic is a bit older and therefore better, but empathetic is acceptable.]

The Asterix figurines were not for sale

2005-05-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

at the giant London toy store (you know the one), so we went away empty-handed. But that was 12 years ago, and the world goes forward:
I won't say what this is because it would be a spoiler, but OMG, as they say.

It's real. Look at the National Gallery link. Guess what will be filling my suitcase this August.

Another chatty posting

2005-05-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

But first the news.

Twice in the last few days the newspapers have shown Bush in Moscow, reviewing the troops with Putin. It's a fine thing to be there celebrating V-E Day 60 with the people who did most of the work in Europe. Not so fine, of course, to do a heroic Admission of Our Errors by saying, We have sinned, too, when the Commie president whose work I am trying to undo conspired to let you guys oppress Europe for fifty years. Pfaugh.

But the thing that struck me was that the pictures keep showing people goose-stepping in the foreground. I know it's a tradition in the Russian army, but there are some traditions that are more honored in the breach than in th'observance. So, today's Orwell quote:

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is "Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me", like the bully who makes faces at his victim. ... Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.
--"The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius", 1941; p. 297 in the Everyman Essays

Looking up the reference, by the way, I found a fine brief essay on the subject, this time about North Korea.

Progressing toward the lighter side, there's a headline I like almost as well as the one about al-Sadr's new pledge.

Chili finger woman has rooting section at arraignment

Finally, what the young man said in a discussion of housekeeping practices. (For the SF-centric: think Castro.) "I live in West Hollywood, Mom. I have to have a dirty bathroom so people will know I'm not gay."

A random literary musing

2005-05-10T00:44:00.000-07:00

The Well at the World's End is surely the best title in English literature; in fact, perfect. It's so good that you hardly have to read the book. Unfortunately, I have taken that fact to heart and have never read the book. Some day—but one is a little afraid that that will spoil the effect when one finds out that the book isn't quite so perfect. Still, when I finally dared to reread Till We Have Faces, it turned out to have lost nothing in the intervening ten years or so; it was even better in places, with a good deal of new material that wasn't there the first time, so far as I remembered.

[Warning: These are the musings of someone who read a novel just last month, or was it the month before? I just had a whim to write a chatty, blog-type item. Now I've worked it off.]

The Herod Prize

2005-05-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

I do not believe, as many do, that religion is a malign influence on intellect and morals. On the historical evidence, it would seem to be morally neutral, like physics or evolutionary biology. (Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. --Tom Lehrer) But some days test my faith in this position.

Today's news hook is the confirmation that the current small polio outbreak in Indonesia is due to the same strain that's circulating in Nigeria and nearby areas. (Nearby is a big term in a place the size of Africa.) We shall now examine how this relates to the King Herod Memorial Prize for Massacre of Innocents. Naturally, we'll start with a huge digression.

The late Pope John Paul II was an indubitably great man. His political importance was huge, even when stripped of recent exaggerations. He was a man of powerful intellect and deep convictions. He was a man of peace, so far as is possible at all for a public person. He loved humanity, and a very large part of humanity loved him with good reason. But there were flaws; and de mortuis nil nisi bonum doesn't really apply to anyone who was a major world power for decades and continued as one right up to the end.

Some hostility has been expressed towards John Paul because in the name of his pro-life doctrine he killed, and is still killing, hundreds of thousands of babies in Africa. One of the implications of being pro-life is that you love fetuses and zygotes and maybe gametes, and need to preserve them; so no birth control. Condoms are for birth control, so they're bad. And if they are needed as part of the containment of AIDS, an epidemic that in Africa has reached a level quite unthinkably awful, then it's necessary to believe that they don't really stop the virus at all. This faith-based scientific initiative is one important contributor to the congenital AIDS that is killing small children in Africa in large numbers, probably millions in the long term. Assessing just how many of those deaths are the Church's fault is something I'll leave to the American trial lawyers.

That's the quantitative half of the Herod Prize. But if you want to reward real evil, you need to take account of malice and sheer nastiness. On this, the late Pope and his successor the former theological Rottweiler simply aren't in the running. For the qualitative champion among faith-based initiatives, we need to go to Africa itself.

Following the extermination of smallpox, there has been an effort to do the same to other epidemic diseases, polio in particular. If you achieve a brief period in which no one in the world has polio, it's gone. It will never appear again unless it escapes from a laboratory. This campaign has been going well, though it has been very difficult. You need to get to places that are not well connected to the rest of the world: places that are, to be blunt, poor and oppressed and ignorant. You need to bring vaccine, which is hard to transport where there's no refrigeration, to any place that has an outbreak; and then you persuade people to be vaccinated en masse. And in Africa you do this through a maze of civil and uncivil wars. To the degree that these are the legacy of imperialism, it's a special duty of Westerners to carry out the effort.

Which brings us at last to Nigeria. (For the lighter side of that tragic nation's most famous export, see the 419 blog.) A few years ago, a number of imams in the outback discovered that polio vaccine is not intended to improve Africans' health; it is a White man's plot to make you sick and exterminate Black people and especially Muslims. They have been quite successful in stopping the vaccination campaigns in some places where polio is still endemic. Recently, the disease has been getting out of hand, and spreading into more of Africa where it had been eliminated before.

The viciousness of this faith-based science initiative, and of the [13-letter plural of 12-letter obscenity omitted] who have spread it, is breathtaking. (Andrew Rilstone deprecates the use of the word evil, but my faith in that position is often shaken.) The qualitative Herod prize goes to them, hands down.

And now their pet disease has hopped out of Africa, all the way to Indonesia. They must be really proud of the gift that they've sent to their fellow Muslims. And it could be something big, a competitor for the quant prize. But no! The world's largest Islamic nation seems to have no use for cruel medieval obscurantist fanatics. There will be no major polio problem in Indonesia because, through all its recent troubles, that nation has maintained its polio vaccinations and has the means and the will to keep on. I will not wish the lunatic-fringe imams better luck next time.

Democracy advances apace

2005-05-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

Very fine column today by Robert Scheer on what used to be called The Lessons of Vietnam. I know that to most readers on the Internet the Vietnam war is a remoter piece of history than the Spanish Civil War was when I was a kid; but it has a certain relevance.

Meanwhile, the inexorable advance of democracy in the Middle East continues. Kuwait, which was saved for freedom and love by the Senior Bush in a war for which the balance of positive and negative arguments had some positives that actually weren't lies, is having elections, in which women can't run.

Years since we liberated (no scare quotes here) Kuwait from Saddam Hussein: 15.
Percentage of Kuwaiti population eligible to vote: 15.

This just in, from Basra: not relevant to anything, you understand; I just like the sentence: "Under pressure, al-Sadr's office issued a statement promising not to attack any more picnics."

Further update: Once the upcoming elections were safely in hand, in male hands, the legislature did finally pass a liberalization of the rules for later elections. This is a good thing. It will be even better when it actually happens; after all, as Islam insists in a principle that ought to have wider acceptance, only Allah knows what the future holds. Meanwhile, the 15 and 15 still stand.

But Iraq is totally different, you see

2005-05-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

Sometimes moss-backed old institutions can be useful. Even the Press. Even the United States Senate.

A couple of weeks ago, a modern, dynamic institution, the special commission appointed to study how the Administration could have got it so wrong abut the Weapons of Mass Destruction, delivered its formal report. Sure enough, wouldn't you know, the government got it wrong. But the commission pointed out that they had no good evidence that anyone in the government had pressured any analysts to come up with these wrong answers to advance the plans to attack Iraq.

Within a week of that, the U. S. Senate was releasing, and the Press was publishing, full details on the ways in which John Bolton pressured the intelligence analysts whose conclusions about Cuban nasty-weapons projects weren't strong enough for him. (Or incorrect enough, of course)

Good thing nobody notices these things. Could be dangerous.

Another damned, thick, square book

2005-05-01T01:08:00.000-07:00

Calloo, callay! It arrived the other day, shipping from powells.com free because I ordered it with another book and got the total over 50 dollars: 1,369 pages of the collected essays of George Orwell. In fact, an almost cubical book. A good solid Everyman edition too, properly hard bound, with no ample margins but with good type on good paper (plus a Free Bonus of a built-in bookmark). A striking contrast to the crummy paper and fuzzy type that Hodder & Staughton used to realize its quite admirable project of reissuing the entire corpus of Lord Peter Wimsey in freshly typeset editions that in most cases are low in typos and sometimes even have corrections for textual corruptions that had crept in over the years; but after all, those are just trade-paperback mysteries and not worthy of the treatment that Harper Collins gave to C. S. Lewis.

My Extremely Significant Other (I call her my little four-sigma) is not impressed by Orwell, because (I think) he lacks the Poetic Muse, hanging out instead with the Political Muse. But that's fine with me. I expect to become insufferable with my masses of quotes from him. Just for the moment, though:

"Is there anyone who has written so much as a love letter in which he felt that he had said exactly what he intended? ... He gets an idea, begins trying to express it, and then, in the frightful mess of words that generally results, a pattern begins to form itself more or less accidentally. It is not by any means the pattern he wants, but it is at any rate not vulgar or disagreeable; it is "good art". He takes it, because "good art" is a more or less mysterious gift from heaven, and it seems a pity to waste it when it presents itself. Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
-- "New Words", April 1940(?), p. 263

Mental instability

2005-04-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

This is a terrible thing, and not suitable for frivolous bloggery. But judge for yourself:

Sergeant Hasan Akbar attacked other soldiers in his unit, the 101st Airborne, in March 2003, just before the division was to be sent to Iraq. He killed two and wounded others, and has now been convicted of premeditated murder. These statements are undisputed.

There is dispute over the state of his sanity, and the correctness of the verdict. And here's what caught my attention. His defense attorney, Major Dan Brookhart, said that (quoting the news story here) "the prosecution's depiction of Akbar as a cold-blooded killer ignored the fact that the defendant was sufficiently mentally ill -- though not insane -- to be confused and fearful about the impending invasion of Iraq."

How crazy can you get?

Horse: I'm not dead yet

2005-04-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

Feeling much better, are you? All right then, WHAP.

A couple of weeks ago a couple of commission reports came out, on intelligence gathering and Abu Ghraib and all that. At one point the advice was given, that if some emergency required exceptional methods of interrogation, such things should be undertaken only by decision of the highest authorities, not by local commanders.

Well and good, but the learned commissioners omitted one significant thing: Torture is illegal, here and now, under the law of the United States, under all circumstances.

It's understandable that hardly anyone picked up on this fact from my previous posting on the Presidential policy for these matters. ("Just say no to torture") After all, it was imbedded in a document that some might think facetious, insisting as it does on the President of the United States as an upholder of the law. Perhaps if I had been more straightforward, they might have picked up on this point of law. Well, no, I suppose not.

Despite the fact that there are only three people in the world who understand this (as Eddington said, Who's the other one?) it's not really difficult. As one-two-three may be a bit of an intellectual strain for the highest level of our goverment, here it is, as simple as One Two:

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." -- Constitution of the United States of America, Article VI, clause 2. The italics are all mine, but you may borrow them if you like.
"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." -- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Article 2, paragraph 2; ratified October 21, 1994 by procedures specified in the United States Constitution.

Moderation

2005-04-13T21:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the California state legislature moved slightly forward with respect to a bill legalizing assisted suicide. But that's not the story.

(But I have to point out to Someone that it's no longer true that no one knows or cares about anything Oregon does. No doubt it's just because California has taken up the issue, but international newspapers now use the phrase "Netherlands and Oregon.")

The Chronicle mentions that a respectable poll showed 70% of the population supporting the bill; this is said to improve its chances.

It also notes that there is opposition to the bill within the Democratic Party (notoriously the home of Godless immorality). This opposition "signals that the measure may have a difficult time getting support from a broader bloc of moderate Democrats..."

And there you have it, folks. To be a moderate means to be prudently just on the edge of the 30%. If you stray too far, setting foot directly in the 70% majority, you are some kind of extremist.

A word from the enemy

2005-04-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

Today there's a piece on the Op-Ed page of the San Francisco Chronicle by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was commander of the military police organization that was in charge of Abu Ghraib. She has been suspended from command duties, and is the only Important person to have suffered any kind of disciplinary action in that affair.

Evil, evil, evil.

Easier to say than Scapegoat, scapegoat, scapegoat. (Three spondees in a row will never make a good rallying cry.) Which is the more accurate? Maybe one should read her statement.

Definitely one should read her statement. Allow for the fact that this career military officer is, in effect, fighting for her life. Then see what she's saying.

One sample: "Army Reserve Spc. Charles Graner Jr., tagged as the likely ringleader, was not so astute or familiar with the Arab culture to devise the humiliating acts and techniques demonstrated in the photographs." Never thought of that, myself; nor can I recall anyone else saying it. She goes on, "It is unlikely any military person designed or directed these photographs, because soldiers are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can face prosecution." I can't say how true that is; she may be biased in favor of the military; on the other hand, she knows a lot more about the military than I do. But which is a likelier suspect: the military, which does have some kind of code and is run largely by people with great pride in traditions of Duty, Honor, Country; or private contractors who officially and explicitly are accountable to no one in the world except the unaccountable secret bureaucracy that hired them?

Duhh, you knew that last part. But when you've read the rest of what she said, you will have an idea of why she was selected as Lord High Substitute to suffer for the sins of the people who were responsible.

I'm very sorry, but

2005-03-23T00:10:00.000-08:00

So the Congress has stepped up to its Constitutional duty to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case. About time. How long were they going to allow it to go on obstructing interstate commerce?

Ethnic compliment

2005-03-20T09:23:00.000-08:00

The current legal scandal around here is the sworn statement made by a retired local prosecutor. He says that he conspired with a judge to keep Jews and Black women off juries in capital cases, because they'd never vote to send someone to the gas chamber.

Congratulations to Jews and Black women everywhere. Such a nice compliment, if hardly an unexpected one.

Note added later: The judge in the case that brought all this on has ruled that the ex-prosecutor's claim is BS.

Maybe there is a God

2005-03-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

Among the various keep-healthy newsletters and ads for newsletters that land in the mailbox is one called Bottom Line Health. I'm almost ready to subscribe, given the news they announce today. It seems there is yet another risk factor for heart attacks, according to several studies, including one at Duke University, so it must be true:

People who interrupt conversations are seven (7) times more likely to develop heart disease.

Walking robots. Home-grown gamma bursts.

2005-03-12T21:25:00.000-08:00

I like these video clips, but mainly for the back story, which you can't get unless you're a member, which is far from cheap unless you're associated with some fine institution of higher learning. Or you could hie yourself down the nearest good library and look in the 18 February 2005 issue of Science(vol. 307, pp. 1082-1085).

What's going on here: Naturally, people want to build bipedal robots that look and walk like robots. The best so far is Honda's ASIMO robot, which can kick a ball and climb stairs. The trouble with that whole line of robot development, though, is that it takes large amounts of computing power, very accurate and fast sensors to monitor things like the angles of all joints, and effectors that are fast and precise and strong. The quality of components you could get in a carbon-based system just wouldn't do it. They also use a great deal of energy. So how do we do it?

These robots attack the problem from the other end. ("It is better to begin at the wrong end than never to begin at all"—C. S. Lewis) They are descended from purely mechanical devices with clever arrangements of springs and weights, which could walk down a ramp under gravity power. It was not clear that such machines could be adapted to walk under their own power on level ground; the videos show that it can be done. By the way, if the MIT machine reminds you of a biped that's not human, know that its ramp-walking ancestor wore a penguin suit.

These three critters have a very limited number of sensors and effectors (such as a pneumatic device that extends the ankle joint at the right time). The MIT machine actually learns to walk by varying its operation with each step and looking at the feedback. All of them walk with about the same energy efficiency as a human being, which is about ten times better than a robot such as ASIMO.

It's reaonable to suppose, as the authors do, that these machines cast light on the mechanisms of human walking. I especially like their point that "simulations used in the development of the Delft robot showed that the swift swing-leg motion not only increased fore-aft stability but also increased lateral stability. Indeed, the physical robot was not able to balance laterally without sufficient fore-aft swing-leg action." Aha! Neither can I. Pipe in mouth—hat on head—umbrella tucked under arm—lean forward sharply—WALK! That's how Monsieur Hulot did it; that's how I do it (less the pipe); I'm looking forward the next robot, The Ambulator Très Ingénieux.

By the way, you can now get a pair of DVDs with "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" and "Mon Oncle" and a weird early short about a proto-Hulot rural postman. Highest recommendation.

I see in one footnote that the ASIMO robot weighs 510 Newtons and can walk about 1.6 kilometer per hour. Now I know that a scientific journal can't use a phrase like "1 mile an hour"; but Newtons? Well, you see, a mass of one kilogram exerts a force of 9.8 Newtons on the surface of the earth. So we scientists express weight, which is a force, in Newtons rather than kilograms. We all know about a billionth of a goat, a trillionth of a boo, and a trillion bulls (nanogoat; picoboo; terabull), but this gives a new meaning to fig newton.

Meanwhile, distant supergiant black holes keep giving out hiccoughs that produce gamma-ray bursts of quite ludicrous amounts of energy, like billlions of Suns, to be picked up by the appropriate instruments on satellites. And now the satellites are picking a new style of burst, as reported in the same issue.
(Science vol. 307, pp. 1085-1088 with summary article, both online articles by subscription only)

These new bursts are shorter (1 millisecond) and have higher average photon energy (a few MeV) than any previously known. Satellite instruments have detected them coming, not from black holes, but from the most mysterious object in the solar system, Earth. Of course, the total energy of one of these is a good deal smaller than the light of even a million Suns.

They seem to be produced by sprites or something similar. (Sprites? Puck wielding gamma rays? Is Oberon working on WMDs to unseat Jove?) Above big thunderstorms there are sometimes red flashes extending as high as 90 km, known as sprites. They may involve bursts of high-energy electrons, which could generate gamma radiation. The gamma bursts are definitely correlated with thunderstorms, anyway. Ex Gaia semper aliquid novi, no?

The Blessing of the Taxes

2005-03-12T14:32:00.000-08:00

We ask God's blessing on our taxes due this April 15. We thank God for the ways that our taxes invest our money for the common good. And we pray for the strength as citizens to press our state and federal governments to spend our taxes in ways that promote justice and peace.
—Reverend Jim Burklow, Sausalito Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Mr. Burklow will conduct an interfaith Blessing of the Taxes service on April 12 at Fairfax Community Church. (The aforenamed places are in Marin County, California. When on 101 I ride, my bosom swells with pride.)

Administrivia

2005-03-11T00:48:00.000-08:00

In response to the frenzied popular demand, I've put up an RSS feed. I think. If someone reports on whether it works, I'll be able to take this posting down. Thank you.