The LTEC Administration
In my blog reading, I'm seeing a bit of frustration and incredulity being expressed about the impressive speed with which the Bush League has been responding to the anticipated yet still terrifying disaster in Southern Louisiana.*
I suppose it will be only the America-hating liberals who will be slapping their foreheads, trying to understand how any group of people — even Republicans! — can be so insensitive, callous, and positively indifferent to the people for whom they were elected [or installed, if not actually elected] to govern, and to their responsibilities in the role of government leaders as stewards of our once proud and admired nation. I fear that many Americans might be embarrassed by the reduced esteem in which we are currently held by much of the world, but those same many Americans are too preoccupied at the moment — as the economy continues to "turn the corner" as it has done for the last 5 years during which each year has seen more Americans fall below the poverty line — with trying to survive.
The Bush League, long recognizable as an economic and social parasite, seems suddenly to have become the Let-Them-Eat-Cake Administration. Gosh, even some of the most apologetic Republican apologists are starting to sound a bit tentative in their usually stalwart conviction that the Bush League can do no wrong.
We were greatly impressed this week when the president, cutting short his near-record-length vacation by 4 days to fly back to his office a mere 4 days after the New-Orleans disaster was well under way, actually took it upon himself to ask the pilot of his own big airplane to fly low over New Orleans so that he might see the situation with his own eyes and even point out some evident landmarks to the amazed assembly of sycophants flying with him.
While we were gasping at the announcement that the president was finally going to tell his cabinet to get to work on this problem, we were also breathless to learn that the president's Secretary of State was taking in a Broadway show and shopping for exceedingly — does one dare say "excessively"? — expensive shoes in New York.
Fear not! We all know that it's really the Vice President who runs things anyway, although he seems to be AWOL, too — on vacation allegedly, someplace in Wyoming, but one wonders since he seems to keep having heart episodes that are variously reported as an old knee problem or else a visit to his old friend the cardiologist. If the unimainable happens and Condi suddenly becomes the next in succession, at least her feet will be well prepared to step into Presidential shoes.
We know that the current President, who never could have attained this office either by election, appointment, or acclamation on the basis of his own intelligence, feels that being President is a special treat: being special, he seems to feel that he gets to do the least work of all. I know, I know, he devotes his time to practicing how to stay on his bicycle and vacationing so he can be fresh and healthy and make crisp presidential-like decisions. Alas, that approach requires that one actually make decisions. We also know that many people feel that this President was guided into office by the hand of their God, which I don't think is likely now to win them many converts among the normal Americans who are trying to survive in this time of plenty for the select few.
Pat-Robertson-style Christian-assination threats aside, it might do the current Let Them Eat Cake Administration well to remember the fate of that other Let-Them-Eat-Cake lady.
———-
*I say "Southern Louisiana" out of deference to my cousins who live in the nearly devastated Slidell — there is more in Southern Louisiana than just New Orleans + wasteland.
Condi Lends a … Foot
What does surprise us: Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue [in New York city], Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman.
["Breaking: Condi Rice Spends Salary on Shoes", Gawker, 1 September 2005. via Shake's Sis.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Gays Finally to Blame
We've been waiting days for someone — finally! — to blame gay people for the current disaster in New Orleans. At last, it has come to pass. You can tell, though, that no one was rushing into the breach. Perhaps Pat Robertson still felt a little tender from being beaten up over his hysterical idea that the US should assassinate the President of Venezuela, so he didn't want to do it.
For some reason, it seems that a headliner could not be found to lay the blame. Indeed, it seems that the dirty job finally fell to some unknown group called "Repent America" (so original a name, too!):
(New Orleans, Louisiana) An evangelical Christian group that regularly demonstrates at LGBT events is blaming gays for hurricane Katrina.
Repent America says that God "destroyed" New Orleans because of Southern Decadence, the gay festival that was to have taken place in the city over the Labor Day weekend.
"Southern Decadence" has a history of filling the French Quarters section of the city with drunken homosexuals engaging in sex acts in the public streets and bars" Repent America director Michael Marcavage said in a statement Wednesday.
"Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city." Marcavage said. "From ‘Girls Gone Wild’ to ‘Southern Decadence’, New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. May it never be the same."
[Fidel Ortega, "Gays 'Responsible' For New Orleans Devastation Group Claims", 365Gay.com, 31 August 2005.]
To be honest, it seems to me that if the Big Guy were really so pissed off about "drunken homosexuals" in New Orleans during Southern Decadence (which, alas, I've never been able to attend, although some thoughtful friends have provided me with strings of beads), He would have waited until they were all there this coming weekend so He could have done a few of them (or is it "us" at this point?) in while he was destroying Sodom by the Bayou.
I guess I just don't understand that whole moving in mysterious ways thing.
Surveying Elayne
I can always count on Elayne Riggs to point the way to curious, informative, and entertaining reading on the Web. I don't know how she manages to keep an eye on all her sources, but I'm grateful. Somehow, I managed to fall behind by a few weeks on my survey of her surveys, so I'm catching up and enjoying a cornucopia of curious stuff:
- Dwight Meredith, at Wampum, explains the Catch 22 in which the poor need to take more vacation time [like Bush] to become better people, but don't dare do it.
- The OEDILF = "The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form", a dictionary of words accompanied by limericks ("definitions") written to employ them. They're still on words beginning with "aa–bn", so it's a chance to get in on the ground floor. I plan to sign up soon. An entry that caught my eye:
bassinet, bassinette by Bemopolis (Brian Moore)
A babe in a new bassinet
Is safe from most danger — and yet,
Being left unattended
Near bears, undefended,
Ends up as a tasty croquette. - "The Parable of Jesus and the Rubber Chicken: What if Christ spoke at a Republican Party fund-raiser?" by Tom Peyer at Slate — almost what you'd expect. It actually made me laugh aloud. Well, my own personal kind of nasal snort thingie, actually.
- Thanks to Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing, a short compilation called "web zen: generator zen"; Dionne Warwick's Cosmic Peephole looks useful, and "Engrish" is a perennial favorite. (Good Engrish phrases always make Isaac snort.)
- "The Universal Packing List": Tell it where you're going, what you'll be doing, and how you'll get there and it tells you everything you need to know to be prepared. Be sure to include "comments" and "anecdotes" for the full effect. Remarkably useful and comprehensive, to be honest.
- A fascinating article, "The Madonna Code: Searching for the perfect music recommendation system", by Martin Edlund at Slate. Apparently, the idea is to find ways to classify music so that new favorites can be found algorithmically. Naturally, since I have a systemetizing personality, that appeals greatly to me.
- Games for the Brain — just try and guess what this one's about. I've already wasted too much time there.
- Ring of Fire ("In Your Face, and On Your Car!"), selling a page full of little Darwin Fish and related emblems for one's car. Personally, I'm looking forward to the promised Flying Spaghetti Monster Emblem.
- A cache of newsletters, "The Underground Grammarian", written by the late Richard Mitchell, which will require a more lingering visit. I'm a sucker for almost anything to do with words.
- A really nifty and sophisticated "color scheme generator", which could provide endless hours of mesmerizing entertainment just looking at all the pretty color combinations.
And not to overlook Elayne's actually writing about stuff, like "Big Woids", always a favorite topic of mine.
Phew. All caught up for now.
———-
*In "Ghoti Just to prove I'm a northern liberal elitis… she offers bonus points to anyone who knows what "Ghoti" refers to. I know, but I don't want to give away the whole thing. However, the password to prove that I know what I'm about is: "tough".
In: All, Curious Stuff, Such Language!
Polygyny and Anteaters
Two selections from today's reading in Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004), mostly to confound fundamentalists and creationists:
The Ethnographic Atlas of G.P. Murdock, published in 1967, is a brave compilation. It lists particulars of 849 human societies, surveyed all over the world. From it we might hope to count numbers of societies that permit harems versus numbers that enforce monogamy. The problem with counting societies is that it is seldom obvious where to draw lines, or what to count as independent. This makes it hard to do proper statistics. Nevertheless, the atlas does its best. Of those 849 societies, 137 (about 16 per cent) are monogamous, four (less than one per cent) are polyandrous [females having more than one male partner], and a massive 83 per cent (708) are polygynous (males can have more than one wife). The 708 polygynous societies are divided about equally into those where polygyny is permitted by the rules of the society but rare in practice, and those where it is the norm. [p 208]
The anteaters don't seem to have made it into North America, but three genera survive in South America, and very unusual mammals they are. They have no teeth at all and the skull, especially in the case of Myrmecophaga, the large gound-dwelling anteater, has become little more than a long, curved tube, a kind of straw for imbibing ants and termites which are chivvied out of their nests by means of a long sticky tongue. And let me tell you something amazing about them. Most mammals, like us, secrete hydrochloric acid[*] into our stomachs to aid digestion, but South American anteaters don't. Instead, they rely upon the formic acid from the ants that they eat. This is typical of the opportunism of natural selection. [p. 215]
———-
*In particular, I want to draw towards this point the attention of those Splenda alarmists who are so concerned that a tightly bound chlorine atom in the sweetner is going to get loose, shoot through their bodies, and mutate them out of existence. The human body, to which salt (sodium + chlorine, recall) is essential and hydrochloric acid is in everyday use, is rather adept at dealing with a chlorine radical should it actually manage to get loose.
In: All, Common-Place Book, It's Only Rocket Science
A Soldier's Epitath
Epitath for the Unknown Soldier
To save your world, you asked this man to die:
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
–October 1953
W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, Edward Mendelson, ed. (Random House, New York, 1979). p. 435.
In: All, Common-Place Book, Plus Ca Change...
Behold Capybara: Fish!
Most rodents are mouse-sized, but they range up through marmots, beavers, agoutis and maras to the sheep-sized capybaras of the South American waterways. Capybaras are prized for meat, not just because of their large size but because, bizarrely, the Roman Catholic Church traditionally deemed them honorary fish for Fridays, presumably because they live in water.*
[Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004), p. 182.]
———-
*Isaac explains that the actual distinction is that the capybara is not a four-footed and hooved land animal, like the cow, the sheep, or the horse (which is not much eaten these days, at least in the U.S.). These are the types of animal that were prohibited eating on Fridays — fish and fowl were permitted because they were created on a different day.
In: All, Common-Place Book, Food Stuff, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Anti-Rational Politics
Politics in America will get more and more pathetic unless and until rationality and the natural world, as it is understood by science, get some respect.
The anti-intellectual tradition in America is part of the cultural bedrock supporting right wing power, but the Left also has a version of it. The corresponding phenomenon on the Left is New Age sentimentality. If you believe in what makes you feel good, then you'll believe whoever makes you feel good. You might vote for some charismatic figure or not vote at all if no candidate makes you feel good enough. If, on the other hand, you believe in hypothesis testing and reality, then you are more likely to figure out how to vote for your own best enlightened interests. Which is what hasn't been happening enough in America.
The spread of belief in comforting supernatural fantasies intrinsically helps politicians who don't face reality, and at this moment they tend to be Republicans, but that could just be a passing phase. New Age magical thinking ultimately harms progressive politics as much as fundamentalism propels the current excesses of the Right (where it strengthens the alliance between the churches and the wealthy.) Somehow I doubt Deepak Chopra is a big Republican supporter, for instance, but by promoting Intelligent Design he discourages reality-based thinking and therefore encourages our current sorry crop of reality-challenged leaders.
[Jaron Lanier, "Intelligent Design and the Quest for a Survivable Spirituality", The Huffington Post, 29 August 2005.]
Celebrity Spokesmodel for President
Continually milling around in my mind are questions like: shouldn't someone in charge of running the country be smarter about a lot of things than I am? Why should I feel safer if the guy in charge is dumber than rocks? If I were having brain surgery, would I like the brain surgeon to be smarter than I am about brain surgery?
In a word, I imagine that it might be nice if such a person were qualified for the job.
But wait — I realize — what if I just misunderstood the manner of the qualifications?
But out in California, [Governor] Arnold [Schwarzenegger]’s Little Helper is Merck, as well as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline and the rest of the pharmaceutical cartel that are ponying up $100 million for the special election that Schwarzenegger has called for this November. Oh, and the other corporations that are going to give him another $100 million or so.
The question for Schwarzenegger, as he deals with his addiction to fundraising, is whether it is going to be as politically deadly for him as Vioxx was for that poor gentleman down in Texas. It just might be.
Corporations in California have bet the farm on our celebrity-bodybuilder….
[Deborah Burger, "When Arnold Falls, Maybe He’ll Take His Corporate Sponsors With Him", The Huffington Post, 30 August 2005.]*
Politicians in the current era of Republican dominance are not meant to be professionals skilled at leadership, institutional management, or statesmanship.
Today's politicians have become Celebrity Spokesmodels for big corporations!
I suddenly feel that I understand the political dynamic so much better.
———-
*From the end of the same piece:
How important is this issue to public policy? Robert Pear reported in the New York Times this week that drug companies spent $86.0 million on lobbying Congress last year, and overall the healthcare industry spent $325 million, more than any other sector. Only when we get the corporate bribes out of the system can we have meaningful healthcare reform, not to mention a host of other important issues that affect patients and consumers.
In: All, Eureka!, Splenetics
New Illiteracy
Some years ago, I had an exchange with a telemarketer that I still remember fondly. She was selling subscriptions to the Washington Post, and seemed surprised that I wasn't terribly interested. In fact, I'd never developed a habit of reading newspapers, and I didn't see a reason to start.
So, I explained to her: "I don't read newspapers." Sudden and total silence resulted. After a few moments, I realized that what she heard was "I don't read", and she was so embarrassed by the idea of trying to sell a newspaper subscription to someone who didn't know how to read that she was speechless. That was truly a moment when silence was golden.
As time went on, I tended to listen less and less to news on the radio*, and watch less and less of it on TV. In fact, I hear almost none on the radio anymore, and never see it on TV since Isaac and I virtually never watch TV these days.
Twenty years ago earnest people tried to convince me that it was some sort of civic duty to read a newspaper and listen to news. I could see that being an informed citizen (informed enough, say, not to make the mistake of electing someone like the current president) was important, but I didn't see then and I don't see now why that meant I had to read newspapers and listen to network news.#
My theory was that if something really important happened, I'd hear about it without really trying: if we were, say, suddenly under nuclear attack from the USSR, someone would run down the hall yelling it quite loudly. It's turned out true. When the events of September 11 began to unfold, I heard every detail without even trying. I used to play a game based on my utter indifference to football and see how long I could go after Super-Bowl Sunday without hearing which team won; with great efforts at avoidance, I might last a week.
Then I started blogging, which means that I started reading blogs. Naturally, I began by reading ones that were on the blogrolls of others that I read. As I go along, I find new blogs mentioned by someone, I find it worth reading and I add it to my list, sometimes dropping one elsewhere. As time passed, I felt that I was moving outward in an ever-widening spiral away from the Big Blogs, the ones that everyone seemed to have on their blogrolls. As was the case with network news, as I dropped the Big Blogs from my reading list I didn't miss anything important that might turn up through their auspices: it always diffused out to my own reading boundaries anyway. I hardly needed to read the Big Blogs when so many others would link to anything that might be actually worthy of attention.
I also had found pretty quickly that the Big Blogs were rather irritating to me, too. Generally speaking, they took themselves far too seriously, consequently treating other blogs as rather beneath their notice. In some ways, I didn't feel enough like sucking up to them to feel worthy — I've never aspired to move in rarified circles where I could refer to celebrities by their first names and have everyone know to whom I referred, not that I would ever accuse David or Kevin of that.
Besides, I'm one of those people who a priori tends to dislike anything popular, since I don't really believe that anything that so many people adore so devotedly can be any use at all. I'm an elitest, thankfully. And, as I spiral outward to the "lesser blogs", my blog reading is much, much more fun and informative.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise whatsoever that I agree completely with Shakespeare's Sister when she wrote:
On a side note, I’d just like to say I run this blog day in and day out without visiting any blogs that I’ve found repeatedly offensive, no matter how important they are alleged to be. There’s simply not a blog important enough to oblige my patronage if I’m compelled to hold my nose while I read it.
(The only reason I mention that is because I’ve too often read other bloggers note, as if with a sigh of resignation, how certain blogs “have to” be read. No they don’t; no blog is indispensable—yeah, including and probably especially this one….)
———-
*It may have had something to do with the scales falling from my eyes — or ears, if you prefer — after All Things Considered did a send-up of all-news-headline radio with updates every 15 minutes: Henry Kissinger is flying to France today to talk to…; Henry Kissinger is leaving Washington at this hour to fly to France…; Henry Kissinger is en route to the airport, on his way to France…; Henry Kissing is arriving at the airport….
#In fact, I think I'm the one who reaps the most benefit since I know people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and their ilk only second- or third-hand, which is more than close enough evidently. I also live a calmer life from not listening to them, and feel more virtuous still for not giving them yet another ear to violate.
Atoms are not Watermelons
A few days back I finished reading How to Write: Advice and Relfections, by Richard Rhodes. Although I'm frequently drawn to read them, books about writing are rarely satisfying, interesting, or useful. Rhodes' book managed all three, and I can recommend it.
Here are three passages I made note of as I read that I wanted to copy into my blog, which also serves as my commonplace book.
People lost in a wilderness have been known to find their way out guided by the wrong map; orienting is apparently a function only loosely tied to locality.1 [p. 30]
Not everyone liked the arrangement.2 Dixie Lee Ray, the eccentric former chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and governor of the state of Washington, reviewed The Making of the Atomic Bomb for the Washington Times. My war scenes were too graphic, Dr. Ray complained. Everyone knows that war is terrible; why go on about it? Worse, she wrote, the book jumps around. [p. 108, italics in original]
A less global structural problem was deciding at what level to pitch scientific explanation. I'd read enough popular science to be impatient with explanation that depended on fanciful analogies. Besides being condescending, comparing an atom to a watermelon wastes half the analogy. Fortunately, nuclear physics is largely an experimental science. Reading through some of the classic papers in the field, I realized that I could explain a result clearly and simply by describing the physical experiment that produced it: a brass box, the air evacuated, a source of radiation in the box in the form of a vial of radon gas, and so on. Then I and the reader could visualize a process in terms of the manipulation of real laboratory objects, not watermelons, just as the experimenters themselves did, and could absorb the culture of scientific work at the same time–the throb of the vacuum pump, the smell of its oil. [pp. 109–110]
———-
1He had been discussing memory and the occasional difficulty of coming up with just the right word. He discusses the use of dictionaries and thesauruses to help, and how he frequently finds words that were "just right" but weren't what he was looking for.
2"The arrangement", that is, of his masterly The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which he uses historical narrative to follow several threads in science and politics, carrying each one to some stopping point before going to previous times to pick up a thread put down for awhile.
Radical Christian Cleric Faces Consequences?
CARACAS, VENEZUELA – Venezuela's government has temporarily suspended permits for foreign missionaries after a U.S. televangelist [extremist radical cleric Pat Robertson] said Washington should assassinate President Hugo Chavez.
[Patrick Markey, "Venezuela halts missionary permits: Action taken after comments by Pat Robertson regarding Chavez", Reuters via Houston Chronicle, 26 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
Clam Names
Because sometimes just knowing the names (finally!) is useful, if not necessary:
All hard-shell clams on the East Coast are the same species, Mercenaria mercenaria, and their common names connote their sizes. The quahog (pronounced CO-hog) or chowder clam is the largest, followed in descending order by the cherrystone, top-neck and little-neck.
[Erica Marcus, "Hail the Humble Clam", Newsday via Baltimore Sun, undated c. 26 August 2005.]
[Update on 30 August 2005: As of today, I am Google's top reference for "Clam Names" (out of "about 254,000")!! Is that cool or what? — Oh gosh, I also am #2 for "Pink Lemons", out of "about 175,000". Oh my, oh my.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Food Stuff
W and Nixon
Richard Nixon must have spent much of his life after the presidency wondering what went wrong — why such an insignificant matter in the grand scheme of things ended his career. I suspect he never fully appreciated how the cultivation of an environment in which the ends justifies the means infected those associated with his administration.
In my judgment, George W. Bush's White House has much more in common with the Nixon administration than with his father's. The same mind-set of the ends justifying the means is at work here, and it may have caught up with Rove and others in the Plame Affair.
[Thomas Pauken, "Rove Behavior — Could it be Bush's Watergate? Adviser shows his Nixonian roots", Houston Chronicle, 20 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Sandwich Thoughts
I used to think I was the only one who noticed and wondered about things like: why did Subway sandwich shops change the way they cut the bread on their subs? Turns out, I'm not the only one. I don't know whether this is comforting or frightening, but it's certainly enlightening.
Steve, at The Sneeze (whose motto I wish I'd thought of), wrote a post in which he wondered the same thing. I just read the post with all the comments to that post, and I highly recommend it. For those of us whose eyes glaze over reading the comments sections of political blogs with all the off-topic mud-slinging and strident invective, try instead this cool and considerate discussion of the comparative benefits of the former "u-gouge" (which Steve preferred to call the "meat boat") versus the more-recent "hinge cut".
The comments thread developed a certain authority when it was joined by Thom McGrath, who is a long-time manager of several Subway shops and was able to give out many definitive answers to questions that many didn't know they had long wondered about, including the reasons behind the switch from "u-gouge" to "hinge cut" — not to mention that they even had names. He also, by the way, revealed at his own blog (The Flak Trap) the change coming to Subway that we won't like.
Briefly, the myth that all the meat at Subway was turkey-based flared, but it was quickly squelched. Only some of it is. A number of people complained about the small amounts of meat on their sandwiches for the prices, but if it's really as little as they claimed it was against company policy. As for the prices, well…. And for all those people complaining about how little meat there is on a typical sub, may I suggest trying a meatball sub? It's guaranteed to make you feel full and bloated, but with a certain attendant satisfaction.
I was always a fan of the "u-gouge" myself, thinking that it was different and that certainly it would let the sandwich hold more without disgorging its contents. True, it was no doubt harder to master than the "hinge cut", but surely striving for perfection is one of the joys of being a sandwich artist? Now I'm told that the "hinge cut" bread can actually hold more when it's done properly.
A few years ago, I seemed to lose my taste for subway sandwiches — it's as though I can't remember what vegetables I had put on to make them taste the right way, and I haven't been able to re-discover the formula since. It may just be my middle-aged tastes changing.
Besides, what I really long for is the taste of the eggplant grinders that I used to get at a particular sub and pizza shop in Middletown, Connecticut when I was in graduate school there. "Grinder", of course, is the peculiarly New-England-y term used to mean "subs" (or "hoagies", at least in Pennsylvania); I found it rather difficult to order a "grinder" for some time after I moved there because it sounded so silly to say it.
Anyway, at this shop they took thick, breaded slices of eggplant and deep-fried them. These they put on sub rolls with quarters of sweet, green peppers, over which they laid thick slices of cheese. The whole thing went into the pizza oven until is was bubbly and toasty. Oh my, but they were good. I might consider making the trek to the old place but for the fear that the memory may be better than the real thing.
In: All, Reflections, The Art of Conversation
Rangel on Fundamentalist Terrorism
"I don't even know who that person [Robertson] is," said Chavez, standing next to Cuban leader Fidel Castro at Havana's airport.
In Venezuela, however, Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel said the U.S. response to [Pat] Robertson [who called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this past Monday] would be a test of its anti-terrorist policy and that Venezuela was studying its legal options.
"It's a huge hypocrisy to maintain this discourse against terrorism and at the same time, in the heart of that country, there are entirely terrorist statements like those," Rangel said.
[…]
Rangel called Robertson "a man who seems to have quite a bit of influence in that country," adding that the comments "reveal that religious fundamentalism is one of the great problems facing humanity in these times."
[Christopher Toothaker, AP, "Chavez lashes back at Robertson: The Venezuelan leader fought back against the '700 Club' host", The Oklahoma Daily, 23 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Who Supports Whom?
It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect's mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.
"I want you to know we support you," she gushed.
Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.
"Military service isn't for our son. It isn't for our kind of people," she told him.
[Jack Kelly, "Parent-trap snares recruiters: The tune changes at some homes when they hear 'sign here' ", The Post-Gazette [Pittsburg, PA], 11 August 2005.]
Bush said he appreciates [Cindy] Sheehan's right to protest and that he understands her anguish because he has met with a lot of grieving families of the war dead. But he said, "She doesn't represent the view of a lot of the families I have met with."
[George Bush, 23 August 2005, to reporters near Boise, Idaho; Darlene Superville, Associated Press, "President Bush Challenges Anti-War Activists, Meets Families of War Dead".]
Journalists can get themselves in trouble by drawing simplistic conclusions based on less-than-exhaustive research, and we won't do so here. But we can at least raise the question of whether the rich are more likely to support the war because their loved ones are less likely to die in it.
[Terry M. Neal, "Military's Recruiting Troubles Extend to Affluent War Supporters", Washington Post, 22 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Real Reality
Senators George Allen and Trent Lott both continue to insist we’re winning in Iraq. Don’t bet on it, bubs. “Winning” isn’t a subjective term like it is here in the United States. Hijacked voting machines won’t do anything against an insurgency, I’m afraid.
[Shakespeare's Sister, "Gee, Ya Think?", 22 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Specious Proofs
The New York Times continues to fan the flames of the "Evolution vs. Intelligent Design" [so-called] debate in what it thinks is an objective, balanced way.*
My favorite bit of reporting was this:
Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, compares the design approach to the work of archaeologists investigating an ancient civilization.
"Imagine you're an archaeologist and you're looking at an inscription, and you say, 'Well, sorry, that looks like it's intelligent but we can't invoke an intelligent cause because, as a matter of method, we have to limit ourselves to materialistic processes,' " Dr. Meyer said. "That would be nuts."
He added, "Call it miracle, call it some other pejorative term, but the fact remains that the materialistic view is a truncated view of reality."
My reaction is: say it fast enough and it's almost as believable an argument as the proof that 1 = 2, and equally useful. What's next: an "Intelligent Design" infomercial?
———-
*Kenneth Chang, "In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash", New York Times, 22 August 2005.
Haldane on Creationism
The plants generally compete by pushing, rather than biting.
[…]
If the world of Nature is God's plan, then attempts to banish pain are contrary to this plan. So are attempts to perfect human society by eliminating the various evils which men inflict on one another.
[…]
Darwin made it reasonable to reject the argument from design, and the evil god or gods to which it leads if carried to its logical conclusion. We have not yet realised what an immense advance in our moral ideas this has made possible.
[Three fragments that appealed to me from: J.B.S. Haldane, "The Argument from Design", 1944, reproduced on The Home Page of Steven Carr.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Eureka!