Clinton's awkward backtracking on Mississippi insult

"[T]he former first lady said the comments she made about the state in the run up to the Iowa caucuses "were not exactly what I said," even though they came directly from an interview she gave to the Des Moines Register in October. Let's review those comments, shall we?

The newspaper quoted the New York senator discussing Iowa and Mississippi being the only states that have never elected a woman governor or sent a woman to Congress.

"How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism; that's not the openness I see in Iowa."

And how does she slither out of this one?

"What I said is what I learned is that neither Iowa or Mississippi had ever elected a woman statewide and I referenced the fact that I was the first woman elected statewide in New York and I told the Iowans that they had a chance to try to change that and now in Mississippi giving Mississippi voters a chance to change that."

Awww, how noble of her! Offering her humble services to lift the benighted Mississippians out of their backwardness.

Obviously, though, her original comment was insulting precisely because she was praising Iowa at the expense of Mississippi--using the latter state as the standard of backwardness. It does no good to say that Mississippi and Iowa both have opportunities with her candidacy. "How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi?" She was flat-out slamming Mississippi.

Damn yankee. (And my apologies to nice yankees out there.)

Eco nonsense

Why does the press give any attention to a group like "Friends of the Earth"? They're complaining that an American Airlines flight from New York to London had only 5 passengers on board...and (oh my gosh!) it still flew!!! They're spitting mad. They don't seem to notice that planes don't fly passengers in one direction only. That plane was going to turn around in London and fly right back to America, carrying more passengers. So what do you gain by not flying out there? You strand another whole planeload of passengers who were going to go the opposite direction!

Nutty environmentalists.

Chicago strikes at the heart of the drug problem

...by wanting to ban Ziplock bags with either length or width under 2". Like the ones I buy to store nuts or loose candy. Or the kind you get sewing and button repair kits in. Right, that'll fix the drug problem. Love this line: the ordinance will be an "important tool" to go after grocery stores, health food stores and other businesses. Yep; those are the ones to go after. Stinkin' grocery stores!

Captured laptop documents Venezuelan aid to FARC

Well, this has got to be embarassing. After killing the FARC leader Raul Reyes, the Colombians have captured a rebel laptop with all kinds of neat-o documents on it. Including discussion of what may be a $300 million gift from Chavez to the rebels: "Who, where, when and how will we receive the dollars and store them?" What to do, what to do?

It also reveals the US (who has some citizens being held hostage by FARC) has been making overtures to them in some odd way. I hope we're not really negotiating with this bunch, but I understand the motivation to do so. Weird is this passage, though:

Writing two days before his death, Reyes tells his secretariat comrades that "the gringos," working through Ecuador's government, are interested "in talking to us on various issues."

"They say the new president of their country will be (Barack) Obama," noting that Obama rejects both the Bush administration's free trade agreement with Colombia and the current military aid program.

Reyes said the response he relayed is that the United States would have to publicly express that desire.

Huh. Well, I'd like to see more about what that means!

Hillary pulls through

Well, I didn't expect this to happen last night: Clinton won both the Ohio and Texas primaries. The Democrats had both a primary (2/3 of the delegates) and a caucus (1/3) in Texas, and while Obama's ahead in the caucus delegates right now, they've not counted all of those, yet.

Now, I want McCain to win the general election, but I'm pulling for Hillary to get the Democratic nomination, since I think she'll be easier to beat. And I agree with Limbaugh's desire to see the Democrats stretch out their primary fight as long as possible. The longer they're beating up on each other, the less we need to do it. The best outcome would be a brokered convention, even. Besides causing more havoc on their side, it would simply be fun to watch. I haven't seen one of those in my lifetime.

Still, I wonder if an extended Democratic primary season is wholly good for our side. The longer their season goes on, the longer the press will be giving them the bulk of the attention. I've been listening to XM Radio's P. O. T. U. S. '08 channel, which is devoted to Presidential campain coverage, and the discussion is mostly about the Democrats, because they're the ones still debating amongst themselves. POTUS '08 has great coverage--I'm not complaining about them; it's inevitable the Democrats will attract more attention as long as there's an actual contest on their side.

Neat, fascinating weirdness in computer science

I mostly use computers for straightforward computational work (and for playing around on the internet), and I don't do a lot of fancy programming. For my astronomy work, I use IDL, IRAF, and SuperMongo (SM). IDL has a kinship with FORTRAN that makes it easy to pick up and simple to crunch your way through a heavy computational problem, and it's adapted for image processing, which we do a lot of in astrophysics. IRAF is its evil-mad-scientist cousin, which is also for image processing, but screwy to deal with and has a lot of black boxes. And SM is a language for making publication-quality plots, as well as calculating things from large tables.

When it comes to writing a quick program to calcuate what I need, I prefer IDL and its FORTRAN-like simplicity and directness. But I have a fascination with the varieties of programming languages out there, and especially the totally different concepts behind some of them. It's like breaking out of the Indo-European languages most of us reading this are familiar with (say, English, German, Spanish, Latin, Russian, and even Sanskrit and ancient Hittite), with their conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns...and seeing how the Semitic languages work (Hebrew verbs have gender, and expressing the genitive case is done by putting two nouns next to each other). Or Vietnamese, which has neither plurals nor past tense, and differences in meaning come in part through the tone of voice.

In that vein, take a look at some of the "Esoteric Programming Languages" listed here in Wikipedia. If your familiar with the simpler BASIC or FORTRAN, see how different the concepts can be and still get the job done. One of my favorites is perhaps the extreme case of a single-instruction language. If chosen carefully, you can do any computation with clever arrangements of that one instruction!

I've taken too long in posting this and want to go on to something else, so I'll get back to it later--more weirdness in programming to come, as well as how this connects with frontiers of physics!

Scholarly shenanigans in Koranic studies?

Nuts--I couldn't find another s-word to put in that title. Oh, well.

Anyway: I've been excited to discover that Christoph Luxenberg's The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran has finally been translated into English. This had previously been available only in German, but it still made a real sensation when it was first published in 2002 or '03. You may have read about the conclusion that the supposed 72 "virgins" the islamist terrorists think they're going to get in heaven might actually be raisins. Really, though, it's not as silly as that: the pseudonymous author says that the passages of the Koran talking about the things in paradise are vague, and the passage that's been thought to refer to virgins awaiting the martyrs doesn't say that explicitly. It speaks of something "white" or "white-eyed" (I'm doing this from memory, so don't quote me on this), and while that's traditionally been thought to refer to virgins, the word is more usually applied to grapes (or raisins). And it would make sense in context, where it's describing the fruits of paradise. Literal fruits, in this case!

But back to our topic: it's now out in English, and I can't wait to get a copy! The publisher quite helpfully links to positive, mixed, and negative reviews of the book. The negative review is written by Angelika Neuwirth, of the Free University of Berlin. From what I've seen on the web, she's considered Germany's foremost Koranic scholar. In trying to find out more about her, I came across this recent notice in the American Thinker's blog. Apparently, the Bavarian Academy of Science had taken photographs of a number of early manuscripts of the Koran, and these photos were (incorrectly) said to have been destroyed during the bombings in WWII. But a scholar there had hidden the photos for decades and (from what I gather) lied about their destruction. His student was this same Angelika Neuwirth. (You can read the Wall Street Journal's article about this here.) She's now leading a team to study them, but very slowly, and without having released the copies of those early manuscripts. They're wanting to produce the first "critical edition" of the Koran--one which accounts for the textual variations amongst the manuscripts. This is the sort of thing that's been done for a long time with the Bible, but never before for Islam's holy book.

Considering the much more direct claim of divine authorship of the Koran and its comparatively recent origin, any textual variations are liable to cause some problems for Moslem theologians. This has been speculated about for some time, but someday, the world will see what those manuscripts actually say. 'Til then, this would all make for an interesting Moslem version of The DaVinci Code!

Georgia tries to sieze a piece of Tennessee

Given the ongoing drought across the South, I'd expect a bit of desperation, but this attempt by Georgia to redraw the Tennessee border takes the cake. The idea is that a border survey done in 1818 was inaccurate, putting the border about a mile too far to the south. It's intended to be the 35th parallel.

Nobody would have pursued this, if it weren't for the drought that's struck Georgia (as well as Tennessee, I'll note). If the border were moved northward, part of our Nickajack Lake (outside Chattanooga) would lie within Georgia, giving them access to a bunch more water right there.

Now moving an interstate border around in the early 19th century, when few people lived there, is one thing. But trying to fudge with it now, when lots of people have property running up to the state line, would cause a lot of problems!

I suspect this won't go anywhere. Tennessee's not allow it. The people who live in Tennessee now (but would become Georgians if the border were changed) are absolutely going to refuse to it. And even if we did agree to let it be redrawn, before anything ever got done, the drought would hopefully be over, and the real reason for pursuing the matter would be gone.

Also take a look at the comments of "dajedikidd" (2/8/2008 11:57:36 PM). He seems to know about surveying, and he gives good advice on the fact of errors (you'll always have measurement errors) and why you don't necessarily redraw a line because of them.

Social Privilege Quiz

Oh, dear. Some social scientist has put together a quiz on "Social Class" or privilege. I won't go over all of it here, but the guys at the Boar's Head Tavern have been tearing it up pretty good. (As well as Scalzi and Megan McArdle here and here.)

But to comment on a few of the questions which are poorly written for the purposes the author wants to use them:

*If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

How far out do we go? I've got one first cousin (out of about 16 or so) who's a pediatrician. Does that count?

Of course, if we talk about my conditions today, I'm a professor, myself. My wife is. And I've got other cousins getting their Ph.D.s right now. But I figure he means, "when you were a kid."

*If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers

How would I know?!?! In my upbringing, we were taught not to compare our family with others in this way! We didn't think in terms of "class," and my father never told me what he made. In fact, he explicitly said he would not tell us kids, so that we wouldn't go and compare ourselves with the other kids' families. It's poor quality upbringing that has people going around thinking about questions like these.

*If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively.

No. People who dress and talk like the East Tennessee hillbilly that I am are made fun of in the media. Aside from that, tough, people whom he wants to flush out as "privileged" would be more likely to answer "no" to this question, because that "class" is generally made out as the bad guys on TV and in the movies. I happen to be an exception, because there's a real stereotype against us Southern rural types that Hollywood still revels in.

*If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate.

Academic scholarships. Wonderful things.

*If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen

Out in the country, who doesn't?! If you're not a sharecropper, it's kind of hard not to own your own house ("or apartment"? Hah, hah, hah! I always thought the people who lived in apartments were ones to pity, whether or not they owned them.). Heck, the family living up the cove from us who were dirt-poor tobacco and cattle farmers and lived in a two-room cabin? They owned their own house, too. And probably a good 20-30 acres to go with it! Hardly had a cent to their names, but they owned a house and a decent bit of land, and that's more than I can say for the "privileged" class growing up in New York City, poor slobs.

*If there was original art in your house as a child or teen

Sure enough! Grandmother was something of an artist, and we had some of hers hanging on the walls. An old girlfriend of my dad's had also painted a nice landscape, and it hung above the mantle. Wait--so that puts me in the privileged class?

*If were read children's books by a parent when you were growing up

Of course. And I fail to see how this makes me more "privileged" than one who didn't. It has nothing to do with money or status or "social class." It has only to do with the care my parents took for me when they read those 95-cent Little Golden Books. Anyone could afford to do that, but not everyone would choose to!

Anyway, I dislike these sorts of things, just as a matter of principle. They're all about breaking down the good manners you were reared on--in not "keeping up with the Joneses" and not comparing your financial/social/etc. status with others--and trying to get you to obsess about it. [grumble]

Kentuck and Ohio in archaeological dispute

Here's some nearly local news for us: a boulder carved with a face, a house, and some names, has been recovered from the Ohio River after being submerged for 87 years. It's from Portsmouth, Ohio, and was probably a navigation marker along the shore there, from back in the early days of the city's settlement. Its existence was recorded by the late 1800s, and there are names of some of the early residents carved onto it.

For reasons that are beyond me, the government of Kentucky is claiming ownership of it, since it had sunk into the river (most of which is inside Kentucky's borders). Now, as much as I like the state of Kentucky, I've got to stand up against that attitude, here. It was, apparently, carved by residents of Portsmouth, Ohio, it stood on the Ohio banks (actually, the story doesn't say that, but I'm guessing, from the background information--if it had been on the Kentucky shore this whole time, that puts a different light on it!), and it was only lost to the waves around 1920. Since when does falling into the water mean the government of another state gets to claim permanent ownership, even after it's pulled back out?

The attitude of wanting government control by default is a nasty one. Or even, in this case, outright government possession by default! Even worse. Heaven help me if I find an arrowhead on the Ohio River banks!

Pravda on the Lost Cosmonauts

Instapundit had a link to this, the other day. Pravda has gone from being the official newspaper in Communist Russia (yes, I know it was the Communist Party paper, but they ran the country) to filling a niche in post-Commie Russia for news about UFOs, news of the weird, and conspiracy theories. (Incidentally, take a look at this article on the "USA plung[ing] into poverty." (I'm quoting the headline.) How do you like the photo that accompanies it? This, for a story about the percentage of Washington state (only) residents under the poverty level increasing from 10% in 2001 to 12% in 2005. I like the half-naked kids climbing onto the family wagon (pulled by a horse, of course), surrounded by piles of junk. Very illustrative.)

Aaaaanyway. Glenn had a link to this 2001 story about supposed cosmonauts before Gagarin, but who died during their missions. There have been rumors about this in the West for decades, and given the secrecy with which the Soviet space program was conducted, it's not surprising. But nothing's come of them, even after records were opened up. There is, even less surprisingly, plenty of stuff out there on the web about these. The Encyclopedia Astronautica has a whole list of the names that have popped up in the "Lost Cosmonaut" rumors over the years, and they've thrown in Maj. Tony Nelson and Roger Healy for good measure. (Find the link for "Lost Cosmonauts.") The latter two they must have had fun with, as their biographies are done totally deadpan. Mentions Major Nelson's wife, Jeannie Nelson (formerly of Baghdad), as well as some of his career milestones and some problems that popped up along the way. Like when he had bad eyesight, nearly keeping him from a flight, until it mysteriously fixed itself a day later. (One of the kids brightened up when I read this part, and she said, "I know that episode!") Includes his later Space Shuttle career. Longest-serving US astronaut!

I can only hope that Stalin and Lenin and the rest of their murderous crew are spinning in their graves, to find that Pravda now has "Showbiz" and "Style" sections, just like the decadent West! And isn't it interesting that it's Pravda, of all rags, that's trading in Communist cover-ups now?!

Bloch Heads

I wrote the other day about the embarrassment that Muslims feel at the actions of terrorists and that physicists feel at the actions of faculty protesters. But in fact the pope too must feel some embarrassment at the actions of some of his self-anointed efenders. At the same time that terrorists were twisting his words to justify their actions, there were those who stepped up to defend the pope by saying, "he was right to call Muslims irrational", although he did not call Muslims irrational. Now that activist faculty members are twisting his words in order to justify their actions, Benedict XVI has his defenders arguing, "he was right to condemn Galileo", although he did not condemn Galileo. Never mind what he actually said. It turns out that the internet is full of geocentrists (Who knew?), and they are quick to crown themselves with the papal tiara.

Most of these Galileophobes of the blogosphere are basing their condemnation of heliocentrism on arguments largely identical to those of Ernst Bloch, as quoted by then Cardinal Ratzinger in 1990:

According to Bloch, the heliocentric system – just like the geocentric – is based upon presuppositions that can’t be empirically demonstrated. Among these, an important role is played by the affirmation of the existence of an absolute space; that’s an opinion that, in any event, has been cancelled by the Theory of Relativity. Bloch writes, in his own words: ‘From the moment that, with the abolition of the presupposition of an empty and immobile space, movement is no longer produced towards something, but there’s only a relative movement of bodies among themselves, and therefore the measurement of that [movement] depends to a great extent on the choice of a body to serve as a point of reference, in this case is it not merely the complexity of calculations that renders the [geocentric] hypothesis impractical? Then as now, one can suppose the earth to be fixed and the sun as mobile.”

What is missing from this argument is that it was Galileo himself who first proposed the Principle of Relativity, that there is no such thing as absolute motion, but "there’s only a relative movement of bodies among themselves, and therefore the measurement of that [movement] depends to a great extent on the choice of a body to serve as a point of reference". It is precisely relative movement that is a Galilean invariant, that is, a quantity that is the same regardless of your frame of reference. And it is this Galilean invariant that means that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa, both in the sun's frame of reference and in every other inertial frame of reference as well.

To see an example of this, first consider this proof that the earth rotates on its axis, and that it is not stationary with the universe revolving around it every 24 hours. Abe and Bill are both on ships on opposite sides of the world on the equator. As Abe watches the sunrise, Bill is on the other side of the world watching it set. At that moment, due to the spin of the earth, Abe, sitting peacefully on the deck of his ship, is actually heading toward the sun at 1000 miles per hour. Likewise, Bill is moving away from the sun at 1000 miles an hour. The magnitude of their relative motion, the motion relative to each other, is thus 2000 miles per hour.

"Ah", but Abe says, "you are saying this from a geocentro-centric point of view. Your reference frame is the center of the earth. From my point of view, I am not moving at all. It is the sun which is moving toward me at 1000 mph, and my buddy Bill is moving away from the sun at 2000 mph." And Abe is precisely right. But what Abe and I both agree on is that the relative motion between him and Bill has a magnitude of 2000 mph. There is no getting around it, their relative motion is a Galilean invariant. The fact that Abe and Bill, both standing stock still on the surface of the earth, have a relative motion of 2000 mph is a sure sign that the earth is rotating, and it is rotating in every Galilean reference frame.

The same thing applies mutatis mutandis to the earth's revolution around the sun. "One can suppose the earth to be fixed and the sun as mobile", says Bloch, but can you really? I tell the geocentrist that he is moving 30 km/s around a stationary sun. "Not at all", says the geocentrist. "I am stationary. It is the sun that is moving 30 km/s."

Fine, in his inertial reference frame he is not moving, and the sun is. But in six months, in that same frame, he will be moving 60 km/s, and in the same direction as the sun, which will still be moving 30 km/s! In what sense, then, can the geocentrist continue to assert that he is not moving? Sure, he can construct reference frames where the earth is stationary for one instant every year, but he cannot escape the fact that the motion of the earth in January relative to the earth in July is 60 km/s. The relative motion of the sun in January to the sun in July, on the other hand, is negligibly small.

"But wait", says the Galileophobe, "Galileo believed in absolute space and absolute time. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (ESTR) did away with all that. Those Galilean invariants aren't invariant at all. The Galilean Principle of Relativity (GPR) is completely wrong"

Actually, at speeds characteristic of the solar system, those Galilean invariants really are very nearly invariant, and GPR is true. But let's cut our Galileophobe a break, and pretend that we are whipping by the solar system in a spaceship at 90% the speed of light. (In that case, GPR really doesn't work.) And as why fly by, we are trying to ascertain whether the sun goes around the earth, or the earth the sun.

Since GPR doesn't work, we cannot rely on the Galilean invariant, the relative motion of the earth in January and July, to answer our question. We can, however, rely on Lorentz invariants. One example of a Lorentz invariant is the 4 dimensional momentum of the earth in January relative to that of the earth in July. Like the relative velocity in GPR, this Lorentz invariant is constant in all inertial reference frames in ESTR. It is quite analogous to relative velocity in GPR, right down to indicating that the earth is rotating about its axis in every ESTR reference frame, and that it is revolving around the sun, and not vice versa, in every ESTR reference frame.

In a sense, Bloch and like-minded bloggers have internalized the Principle of Relativity too well, better than GPR, or ESTR for that matter, can hold. GPR and ESTR hold for translational motion, but not for rotation or revolution, as has been demonstrated by a straightforward application of these theories themselves. The reason for this is that translational motion is qualitatively different from rotation and revolution in its very definition. Unlike translational motion, rotation and revolution always imply acceleration.

Muslims and Physicists

On 12 September 2006 in Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI gave a lecture titled "Faith, Reason and the University — Memories and Reflections". In that lecture, the Pope quoted a question by Christian Emperor Manuel II Paleologus put to the Muslim Worthy Mouterizes. It was a rude question, asked "with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded", said the pope. He recounted this dialogue between the Emperor and the Worthy in order to demonstrate the difficulties involved in inter-religious dialogue, but very soon his lecture itself became a parable of the perils of that dialogue. The pope's words were repeated out of context around the world. Muslim terrorists used these words as an excuse to commit those actions for which they are always cooking up an excuse. In the days that followed, churches were burned and bombed, Christians were lynched, and most notably a nun was murdered along with her muslim bodyguards.

Muslims everywhere were mortified and embarrassed by the actions of their terroristic co-religionists. The killers of the nun have been arrested by the Islamic government of Somalia, and they will be punished.

But today it is the turn of Physicists to be embarrassed. The physics faculty at Sapienza, the university of Rome, have organized a protest against the pope's planned visit to the university. They have enlisted as allies in their protest Italy's radical homosexual movement, elements of which have called for the assassination of Cardinal Bagnasco, and the anti-globalization movement that rioted during the July 2001 G8 summit in Genoa. Those 2001 protests had left over 400 injured and 1 dead.

Needless to say, the pope did the decent thing and cancelled the visit. He released the text of his banned speech; a translation is available here, courtesy of Asia News.

So what exactly, are these physicists so outraged about? Benedict XVI had visited Sapienza before, but then he had been named Joseph Cardinal Raztinger. On March 15, 1990 he had given an address called "The Crisis of Faith in Science". At that time, the professors say, he said that the conviction of Galileo had been "rational and just". Appalling!

But just like the terrorists in 2006, the activists of 2008 had quoted Ratzinger quoting someone else, and had purposefully taken that quote out of context. National Catholic Reporter has provided a translation of the address here.

In his address, Ratzinger quoted the usual anti-science suspects. His longest quote was from the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, who spouted off the usual drivel, that Einstein had refuted Galileo once and for all. Does the Earth orbit the Sun, or the Sun orbit the Earth? It's all relative! One is as good as the other! (Sheesh.) But the money quote was from agnostic anarchist Feyerabend, saying the "verdict against Galileo was rational and just". Ratzinger then went on to cite the illustrious physicist Carl Friedrich Baron von Weizsaecker who marked a direct path from Galileo to the atomic bomb.

So why was Ratzinger quoting all this negative spin about Galileo? Was he saying, "let's have more of this dirt on Galileo, let's pile it on!"? Not hardly. He was talking about a crisis of faith in Science, a crisis closely linked to post-modern philosophers. He used these philosophers as a negative example for Christians, "The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation and from being inscribed in a still greater form of reason..." Christians should resist the resentment that turns Galileo into a scapegoat for the atomic bomb or anything else.

The ultimate irony of the faculty's successful attempt to ban the pope is the text of the banned speech itself. Early on Pope Ratzinger mentioned his earlier address at Regensburg. Perhaps he had Regensburg on his mind when he warned of a danger to reason in the last paragraphs: "that reason in the end may bow to the pressures of partisan interests and instrumental value".

A neat, old, science fiction story, and science fiction in the service of ideology

I was listening to the old science fiction series "X-1" on XM radio last night, when they played an episode from 1956(?) entitled, "The Tunnel Under the World." It's taken from a short story by the (still-living) Frederik Pohl about a man who keeps repeating the same day, June 15th, but with slight variations. I won't spoil the entire plot, in case you get the chance to hear or read it, but you can read a summary of the short story in the first link above, which is only slightly different from the radio version. The story is a fascinating one and creepy when you discover the twists and revelations.

Anyway, I was impressed and looked up Pohl when I got home. It turns out that he was high-school friends with Isaac Asimov and that both were early members of a group of science fiction fans called the Futurians. Checking up on what the Futurians were, I found that they were a splinter group from another New York City sci-fi fan club, and they advocated sci-fi fans to push for ideology. Inevitably, this meant communism:

At the time the Futurians were formed, Donald Wollheim was strongly attracted by communism and believed that followers of science fiction "should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence".[2] It was to this end that Wollheim formed the Futurians, and many of its members were in some degree interested in the political applications of science fiction.

Yeesh! Nothing like the phrase "scientific world-state" to give you the creeps. Especially in the '30s.

Pohl himself was an outright member of the Communist Party, until he was expelled in '39. It was either because, as some say, the Party thought science fiction was escapist and didn't contribute to the building of the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever, or, as Pohl says, that he rejected the Party line over the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Either way, he apparently remained a true leftist, and his writings display a satire of capitalism and advertising. Actually, I've got to say that the bit that comes through in "Tunnel" is well done and could have been written by a conservative, as well.

There's a whole weird history to this science fiction fan activity, something that I've never gotten into. I enjoy my sci fi movies, but I've rarely read any such books. Funny for an astrophysicist, right? So outside remarks by friends, I'm unaware of what all has gone on in this world. At one level, it seems so trivial (they're fan groups--not necessarily even writers, though many became such), but these guys clearly saw themselves as doing important work, and the Futurians were even claiming it was all in the service of the future "scientific world-state"!

Well, I'd intended to write more about the connections between "scientific socialism" and science fiction, but I'll just have to save it for later. I ought to close this off with the connections "Tunnel" has with other works: Simulacron-3 (1964; made into the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" in 1999) has a similar premise (I'm guessing the writer was familiar with the earlier work), and it in turn influenced "The Matrix" (1999). Interestingly, Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story in 1960 that dealt with some aspects of the same premise. Lem also wrote Solaris, which was made into the George Clooney movie a little while back. I just read the book, which is thought-provoking.

More new exoplanets

A nice article in the NYT about the discovery of a fifth planet around the star 55 Cancri (a faint star in the constellation Cancer). This is, I believe, the most extensive solar system yet found, outside of our own. It's exciting to see this many planets around a star, but beyond that, this helps us understand more about planetary system formation.

Until 1994, the only example we had of a planetary system was our own solar system. So when you read in textbooks how planets formed around stars, there was a lot of theory but only a single example. Now, knowing the laws of physics, we weren't just feeling around blindly. But it's always better to have multiple data points to test your predictions.

Now, we've found over 250 extrasolar planets (or "exoplanets"), we have a better idea of how they tend to look. But we still need to find more examples of multiple planets around a single star--a solar system. When we see the range of properties of solar systems, we'll be able to test the theories of planetary formation in greater detail. For instance, the presence of a single massive planet, like Jupiter, can affect or even inhibit the formation of other planets nearby. Witness the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Jupiter's tidal forces have prevented a major planet from collapsing from the debris there. In the 55 Cancri system, there's a similar wide gap near its largest planet (at least as far as we can tell today). In how many other systems will the same feature appear?

And there's always the chance that the now-crank Bode's Law has some natural basis. It's a particular power-law distribution of the planets, and while we don't expect that it has any force in and of itself, there are theories that would account for power-law distributions in general (cited at the bottom of that Wikipedia article). The discovery of new solar systems gives us more data to test these theories, too.

The travails of Antioch College

I'd read earlier in the year about Antioch College planning to close. This article says they may remain open a while longer, but things still aren't looking good. I'd never heard of Antioch until I was in college, myself, and Antioch became the subject of ridicule for their sexual harassment policy, which required explicit "verbal consent" at each stage of...let's say, "interaction." ("May I proceed to nibble on your ear, now?")

It wasn't a disapproval of premarital sex, of course. That was all well and good; you just had to stop and do the paperwork (so to speak) at each step along the way. To avoid a rape charge the next day, I reckon.

I've always thought keeping your pants on before you were married was a better solution to the problem, really, but that would be to impose a moral system on the whole enterprise, heaven forbid.

Anyway, though surprising that any college had put such a silly rule in place, it's not surprising it was Antioch that did it. Liberal bastion they:

The alma mater of Coretta Scott King, "Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling and two Nobel Prize winners, Antioch College doesn't grade classes, encourages students to develop their own study plans and combines academic learning with experience through a co-op program in which students leave campus to work in various fields.

The reasons for their current problem confuse me a little. I simply don't expect 150-year-old colleges with their reputation(?) to leak students so badly. But I've read it could be from the administration's losing focus on the college and branching out too far with...well, "branch" campuses and other programs.

Link for Pakistan post

I forgot to link below. Here's the BBC story on Bhutto calling for protests against Musharraf's emergency rule. I reckon the big news is her split from Musharraf, after their earlier negotiations for her return.

The trouble in Pakistan

Grrr. Musharraf is breaking promises again, or it sure seems like it. Is it a coincidence that his declaration of martial law occurs just as Bhutto has returned for a revived political career?

I don't know...maybe it is simply a result of the Islamist attacks recently; it's so hard to tell from the news reporting whether there's been a sharp increase in their number since Bhutto's return or not. Obviously there was the large attack on Bhutto's arrival itself, but I haven't been aware of what else is going on in the country, differently from before.

I would have to think that Musharraf knows his arrangements with Bhutto (to run together, as it seems, for elected office) put him in a very public commitment to going ahead with democracy. Is he really going to turn opinion that strongly against himself for this?

Of course, he'd promised to hold elections a few years ago, too, and look where they are now. I really hope he upholds the deal that Bhutto's return implied. Pakistan's going to need democracy, and it's going to need to marginalize the radical Islamist elements within the society. Maybe the Musharraf/Bhutto arrangement could do that.

Clinton on Clinton

So Hillary's campaign is having to back away from some of Bill's comments on her rivals. Interesting. I remember that Hillary was occasionally an albatross around Bill's neck during his campaigns, and they'd have to hide her for a few months until the election was over. I'm a little surprised that Bill is now the one making comments they've got to repudiate.

Well, maybe that's too strong a word. Folks on the conservative side had wondered how helpful Bill would be to her campaign, but for different reasons. Which would have the stronger effect on people--his charisma and personal popularity, or memories of his behavior and the scandals?

Now Bill's compared Hillary's rivals' criticisms of her "candor" (they noted that she's been contradicting herself, so which of her statements are we to believe?) to the Swift Boat Veterans' ads against John F. Kerry. I'd like to say that that's an outrageous comparison...because it insults the Swift Boat Vets, but really, both were honest criticisms.

The AP article I've linked to (via Drudge) says that the swift boat ads "questioned John Kerry's patriotism," but I don't remember that at all. They certainly reminded people of his wild and apparently baseless accusations of war crimes against his compatriots and of the way in which he puffed up his war record, maybe dishonestly (the ads flat out said much of it was a lie).

Now, that's still a tough criticism, and Hillary's opponents haven't been that hard on her. If her campaign, Bill included, is going to make out that she's beyond any criticism, that criticism is beyond the pale, they're going to have a tough time selling that to the public.

Still, back when she ran for the Senate, she was at her most popular when she played up her victim status, wasn't she?

Lawsuit against Regnery

Hmmm...there's some unhappiness with Regnery Publishing's sales methods. They're accused by some of their authors of steering sales to outlets they're tied in with, thus cutting down on authors' royalties. A few, including Joel Mowbray, Bill Gertz, and Richard Miniter are even filing a lawsuit against the parent company.

Shame to see, regardless of what the truth is. I've got a couple of their books, and I like that they've been willing to publish conservative authors. They've been really helpful to conservative politics, and I'll be happy to see any rift here fixed.

The turnabout on that Armenian genocide resolution

My dad and I have both been asking, "What is the push to do this now?!" I've always accepted (or just assumed) that the massacre of the Armenians was a genocide, but as for the technical meaning of the word, I'm content to leave it to historians. I do not look to my Congress for history lessons. And nearly a century after the Armenians were slaughtered, it is not exactly a profile in courage to stand up against it. It does nothing more than make the Congressmen feel better about themselves and give their Armenian-descended constituents the satisfaction of having somebody poke a finger in the eye of the Turks. I sympathize with the Armenians and don't begrudge them wanting to have somebody do the latter, actually, but it's not the Congress' job to do it.

Congress should have asked themselves, (1) "Is this part of our job?", and (2) "Is this in America's interests?" The answer to both, I think, is "no." Furthermore, will it hurt America's interests? Clearly, it will. Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq. Possibly justifiably, considering the cross-border raids some Kurds have made, but obviously a Turkish invasion would destabilize the safest region of Iraq. And do we trust the Turks to be restrained in shooting Kurds? I'm not so sure.

What about Turkish cooperation with America in the Global War on Terrorism? It's a tentative thing already, but they're a necessary ally, and one of our few near the Middle East. Don't purposely go and tick them off! Not if you don't actually need to.

These meaningless resolutions are pointless and cheap in the best of times, but this one would actually have harmed American interests. I'm glad the Democrats are abandoning it.

And then there's this take.

Martian caves?

On a similar note, there's this discovery of caves on Mars. Or at least deep holes in the ground. They're on a volcano, so they're likely to be lava-related, rather than water-carved. They determined their nature by watching their temperatures, compared with their surroundings. Caves on Earth maintain a nearly-constant air temperature inside, day and night, summer and winter. These aren't perfectly constant, but their temperature swings are only one-third that of their surroundings. So if they're not complete caves, they're at least very deep holes.

Martian geology--no water?

(Via the Boar's Head Tavern) One group is claiming the evidence for water on Mars has evaporated.

OK, bad joke. They're saying that surface features that look like they're water-caused are either from lava flows (big canyons in the flatlands) or landslides (smaller gullies on hillsides).

I've long been hoping we'd find active water sites on Mars, so I'm not an objective reporter on this, but I'm skeptical. The evidence for water (both in the distant past and the immediate present) has been building up steadily for the past decade. Soil chemistry in the plains (I'll need to find a specific reference--going from memory, here) shows evidence of having been in standing water in the past.

And the gullies that open out from cliff faces don't show the scree-slope shapes that you'd expect from landslides--the have carved channels, with meandering. You need a liquid to do that. Rock and sand piles up higher in the middle of the slide and makes a convex feature. Water-carved features are concave, like what we see on Mars. These are the sites we've been seeing before-and-after photos of, demonstrating active geology, probably flash-flooding from water gushing out of the cliff.

The new data might undermine a few specific arguments, but I doubt they're going to sweep away all of the evidence that's been piling up since 1997.

More on Syria's nuclear project

(Via Instapundit) The Israelis have captured North Korean nuclear material in Syria. That, plus the overflights the other week, and some exchange of gunfire (I believe I heard that on the news last night)... Wonder if Dennis Kucinich regrets that enthusiastic trip he made to Syria recently.

Probably not.

But can our politicians please stop treating Syria like some kind of partner-for-peace now?

More things I didn't want to wake up to:

Syria's working on nukes. And they might be coming in from North Korea. Well, that explains the Israeli overflights the other day.

And then we've got Dennis Kucinich visiting Syria and criticising Bush and Israel there. Yeah, that's the way to go. Buck up the nuclear-researching, terrorist-supporting, Iraq-destabilizing, America-hating dictatorship there. Nice move, Congressman.

Sheesh, if they'd just called it their "cabinet," I wouldn't have panicked!

So I get greeted this morning by the news that Putin has dissolved the "Russian government." Glenn Beck mentions it on the radio; I check Drudge and find a bright red headline saying the same thing. YIKES! That substitutes nicely for coffee in the morning.

Then I read the AP article, which explains this means his administration. Which he's cleaning out in preparation for elections. Not every official, elected or otherwise, in the Russian government.

OK, calming back down. Panic subsiding...

Man, if they'd just refer to the executive branches of parliamentary systems as an "administration" instead of a "government," it'd be a lot less confusing for those of us here in the US, where "government" means the whole shebang. Sheesh; I'd thought Putin just fired the legislature and was ready to rule as an outright dictator.

...still, that AP article does say, "Fradkov [the now-outgoing Prime Minister] said he asked for the dissolution of the government because with elections approaching, Putin needed to have a free hand to make decisions, including those concerning appointments." Huh. Not sure about this...

Aw, geez, Brookhiser.

One more reason I've never been a big fan of Rick Brookhiser: In his Corner post on why Thompson is the weakest of the GOP front runners, he writes,

Fred Thompson came to the offices of National Review some years when he was still in the Senate. I liked him fine. He has done nothing, anywhere, ever. The Hubble Telescope could not find what he has done, because he has not done it.

Yes, he's knowingly exaggerating, but it's not done in a funny way. It's annoyingly earnest, like he's trying too hard to be funny and serious at the same time. And it's a false statement: Thompson's been a very popular sentator for eight years, he's been a lawyer who helped bring down the corrupt Governor of Tennessee (Ray Blanton, 1977-80) for selling pardons, he was GOP counsel on Watergate (he came up with the "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" question for Sen. Baker, and I think he also prompted the question about the Oval Office tapes). Yes, he was an actor when some of these other guys were running businesses or whatnot, but he's got a good background in the law and fighting corruption.

Now, my annoyance is partly because I'm a fan of FDT (Fred Dalton Thompson), of course, but I'm often annoyed at Rick Brookhiser in general. He espouses a city slicker Yankee version of conservatism that I'm uncomfortable with, politically and socially, and he does it with a lot of condescension towards those of us who would otherwise be on his side in politics. Socially, culturally, and so on, I see him sneering at us rural Southerners. I'm probably exaggerating how much, just because I'm sensitive to it, but it's certainly there.

He's a Hamilton & Adams over Jefferson guy. Which is something I thought was unconservative altogether, until I discovered a few others who hold the same views.

Sigh. Well, Rick Brookhiser doesn't run the country, so I can probably rest in peace.

Religious liabilities for Presidential candidates

They're not what I would have figured. For all of those who assume that, say, being Jewish or Catholic would be a big liability in a Presidential candidate, it turns out these are among the smallest religious liabilities in the Pew poll:

[...] more people express reservations about voting for a Mormon (25%) than about supporting a candidate who is an evangelical Christian (16%), a Jew (11%) or a Catholic (7%).

Now, the focus was on Romney and what being Mormon will do for or to his candidacy. But the other three numbers are what struck me. "Evangelical Christian" (by which they probably mean active Protestants...I'm in such a church, but I never heard the term growing up, so I've always been a little confused about its meaning) is a bigger political liability than being Jewish or Catholic. One thing to take from this is: great news for Jews! More mainstream than the biggest religious block in the country. (Wow, actually.) The second is: for some Catholic bloggers (there's one particular one I've got in mind) who like to call anti-Catholicism as the "last acceptable prejudice" (especially in political fights), well, it's apparently not. Boy, the anti's on that one are less than half what they are for evangelicals. Wow, again.

Now, of course, just about everybody's faction likes to call opposition to them "the last acceptable prejudice." I've heard it for conservatives, Protestants, whites, Southerners, right-handers, etc. Just about any group that's not a racial or ethnic minority. (I made up the last one.) Fact is, there are lots of relatively mild and fairly accepted prejudices left in the country. Not to the point of being enshrined in law, of course. So claiming you're a member of the only group people can hate anymore isn't going to be true.

The Clinton Tapes

Have you ever asked yourself, "What's in Bill Clinton's sock drawer"? Well, ask no more.

Bin Laden video: weird freezes

Huh. I would have thought that the fact the new bin Laden video freezes in a couple of places (including every time current events are mentioned, although the audio continues) would get some wider coverage. This liberal site points it out (link from Lileks). Of course, for some of them, a possibly faked (or spliced) video seems to mean Bush faked it. (For this guy, Karl Rove is the culprit, as I figured the other day.) Whereas my thought would be that al Qaeda's crack multimedia engineer did it. I'm glad to see that the website's editor (or whomever posted the video) seems to go in my direction on this.

There are no "coincidences" with Karl Rove

So, let me get this straight: Karl Rove resigns, and a week or so later, we have a new video from "Osama bin Laden"?! I don't think so! If there's one thing we have learned from our experiences with Mr. Rove, it's that there are no coincidences. There are, instead, grand schemes being played out on the political stage that lesser minds see as unconnected, unrelated.

Notice that Rove didn't get fired or asked to resign. He parted on good terms with Bush. Why is that? It's because he's still working for him! After his evil masterpiece in planting the false Texas Air National Guard memos on Dan Rather and getting Rather to broadcast it, after running it past his fact-checkers and totally ignoring their warnings about them looking fake, Rove is ready for anything. Now he's made a "bin Laden" video in which the guy totally sounds like a mainstream Democrat, just in time for the primary debates. Qui bono? You know who.

Eric, over at Classical Values, sees a political opportunity in all this (for a Noam Chomsky/bin Laden no-tax ticket). I see conspiracy.

On popes and the supreme court

Since the earliest days of the papacy, popes have exercised power outside of Rome primarily through judicial means. Even though the popes have always claimed legislative and executive power also, the realities of communication in the ancient world normally prevented the exercise of any such power. The popes effectively had power only on those who presented themselves before their courts, usually to appeal a decision made by a synod of bishops or by a patriarch.

Modern communication and society have greatly increased the potential for the executive or legislative authority by the pope, as has been demonstrated by the great John Paul II to the delight of his admirers and the consternation of his critics. But generally the governance of the Roman Catholic Church has been guided by tradition, and tradition definitely favors the judicial model of papal power. The pope reigns primarily by either approving or not approving the findings of his various courts, commissions, congregations, and other dicasteries, known collectively as the Roman Curia. Many of these dicasteries are likewise themselves courts of appeal. When a pope does otherwise, and issues a judgment by his own initiative, the document associated with a papal decree is called a motu proprio, and its issuance is something of a Big Deal.

And so Benedict's issuance of the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum is only the second of his pontificate. This document makes it easier to celebrate the liturgy as published in the 1962 editions of the missal, the breviary, and the ritual. In particular it frees up the celebration of the older form of the mass, which has been blocked in many dioceses because of the hostility of the bishops to the old edition of the Roman rite.

This motu proprio has been rightly criticized as a blow to "collegiality", the notion that the pope rules the Church with the bishops, as opposed to lording over the bishops. So it is interesting to note that this motu proprio, although it is in fact an executive papal decree issued over the objections of the bishops, phrases itself as a judicial document. In particular, it opens by stating that the old edition of the liturgy has never been abrogated, which comes as news to most Catholics. Today, blogs are filled with hostile commentators questioning the theoretical legal basis for such a statement, but such questioning is in fact purely theoretical. Any legal realist has to recognize the fact that the highest court in Catholicism says the old edition was never abrogated, so we all must act as if wasn't. (In fact, the proponents of abrogation are having a hard time pointing to an explicit and unambiguous decree to that effect.) The motu proprio then goes on to place some executive restrictions on the use of the old edition. These restrictions are not nearly tight enough to satisfy Benedict's critics; to them he has effectively de-restricted the old mass and the rest of the old liturgy as well.

So the critics howl about a violation of collegiality, and about how the pope has made a grab at the power of the bishops, and yet this motu proprio will in all likelihood only add to the great popularity and prestige of Benedict, just like his predecessor John Paul gained popularity and respect in part by ignoring the demands of collegiality. It's not hard to understand why; in fact to some degree it is the same reason that the supreme court of the United States gained so much prestige in the sixties when it was grabbing power from the states. The popes, like the sixties supremes, stuck up for the little guys against the establishment.

John Paul stuck up for the guy in the pew when poncy academics wanted to use his church's pulpits to attack his faith; too often bishops and pastors were too weak to stand up to the academics. While Benedict's style is less confrontational than John Paul's was, he now shows that he too has the guts to stand up when persuasion fails.

Fans of the older edition of the liturgy have too often faced condescension, being told that their requests were being honored (if in fact they were) because their brittle old brains were not strong enough to accept or understand the new changes. Never mind that many of these fans were and are quite young. They were told that they were not educated enough to understand the theology of the new mass, never mind that the theology of the new mass is the same as that of the old, as any educated catholic could tell you. They were told that nostalgia had overcome their good sense, never mind that many were born after the new edition of the liturgy was published. They were vilified as sexists and anti-semites, and told that the old edition they wanted was rife with sexism and anti-semitism. Never mind that the fathers of Vatican II would have been surprised to hear these assertions and would have rejected them.

It seems rarely to have occurred to those thwarting the fans of the old edition that they might indeed be mature, intelligent adults who just happen to disagree with the critics of the old edition. That sort of oblivious attitude is common in cliques and in circles with a heavy atmosphere of clubbiness. And clubbiness is nothing more than the dark seamy underbelly of collegiality.

Such collegiality was on display when Bishop Anthony Bosco of the diocese of Greensburg in Pennsylvania was asked years ago, during the previous pontificate, whether he planned to allow the old edition of the missal to be used in his diocese. His response was that because the priests of his diocese were "pleading with" him not to allow the old edition, he would not. Who could blame the bishop for siding with his priests as they closed rank to do battle with their own flocks? But now His Excellency, like a state legislator, has been exempted from the need to take sides. The pope has thankfully taken the matter out of his hands.

The misgovernance of the bishops has done more to enhance the power of the papacy than any "power grabs" by the popes, much as the misgovernance of the states has led to our present imperial judiciary. This was most eloquently pointed out by his eminence Darius cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, who said in an interview, "formally, the mass of St Pius V was never abolished. Surprisingly, those who set themselves up as authentic interpreters of Vatican II gave it an interpretation, in the field of the liturgy, so restrictive and so little respectful of the liberty of the faithful, as to make the Council seem even more coercive than the Council of Trent."

With this motu proprio Benedict has given justice to a despised minority. The fact that he has done so at the expense of some of the bishops' legitimate power will not bother the man in the pew, who doesn't worry much about the privileges or authority of those who condescend to, belittle, and sneer at him. Even the majority of pew sitters who, like me, do not much care which edition is used can recognize the difference between an oppressor and a liberator.

Are we back to the '90s?!

Should I really believe that the Clintons had a henchman break into Kathleen Willey's house to steal her book manuscript about the Clintons? I mean, would they really do something dirty like that?

Well, considering that I've heard similar stories coming from around them for a decade and a half, now, any surprise or resistance I'd naturally have to that kind of theory is pretty much broken down, now. Hmmm...actually, I don't remember if I ever had any resistance to that. But I sure don't now.

I'm trying, though, not to believe any crazy idea that puts the Clintons in a bad light, but to use some critical thinking about them. But this still seems plausible. And considering the threats made against Mrs. Willey back in the 90s, when she was providing testimony unflattering to the Clintons, I'd almost expect something like this.

Let's see if this story gets picked up, or if it's ignored.

Fred Dalton Thompson announces

Thompson announced his candidacy for the Presidency on Leno last night. I was going to say "it's about time," but really, the race has started soooo blamed early this time around that I'm glad he waited. I wish the others would have. I'm going to be sick of the whole thing well before the election.

I agree with Jonah Goldberg that the pundits are wrong when they claim that his delayed entry, or signs of a lack of "fire in the belly" for the race, will hurt him with voters. That's really more of an inside-the-beltway criticism that most of us don't care about.

Russian aircraft probe British airspace

What, are we back to the Cold War?

I just heard on the radio that Russian military aircraft were turned away from British (and Norwegian, I think) airspace in the wee hours of the morning. I remember this happening a few times when I was a kid, over Alaska. Routine enough stuff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, really, but I was hoping they didn't see themselves in the same antagonistic role anymore.

Dang.

A common sense layman on global warming

Phillip Winn, over at the Boar's Head Tavern (a great religion discussion site, if you haven't discovered it yet), has posted a common sense layman's reaction to claims of global warming that is pretty close to my opinions.

I've especially wondered (for years--it was the first thought I had about this when they first heard of "global warming") about the placement of the temperature monitoring stations. Are they close to growing population centers? There are heat islands around cities, after all. What are the chances a nice backwoods weather station in 1865 is going to be closer to paved roads and strip malls today? How much does that bias its records?

Winn mentions station placement more generally and links to a blog entry on "how not to measure temperature." Love the photo on the link. What were they thinking?

Back from vacation

Sorry for the long delay, but it was a busy end to the summer. I'm back, now that school's started. Which actually means that I have less free time, but I'll be spending more of it blogging, for some strange reason.

And now...on with our show.

Astronomy and religion intersect.

Well, maybe not in those terms. But there's a nice astronomy/spaceflight comment on a religion blog I've gotten to like a lot, Boars Head Tavern. Joel Hunter likes this kind of stuff, he says, and he's posted a list of what he'd do if he were the NASA administrator.

One of my favorites:

* move mountains and work tirelessly and loudly to expedite the Constellation program–get Orion and the heavy lifter built–human mission to the moon no later than 2015 (c’mon, Kennedy got ‘em to do it in 7 years; we can, too)

Amen, brother! Let's get men back on the moon; it's been too long. I've never understood those astronomers (it's obviously not all of us!) who want to fight turf wars for robotic missions to the complete exclusion of manned space missions.

And now, drunken astronauts...

It just keeps getting better for NASA. While investigating patterns that could identify unstable astronauts like Lisa Nowak (who was planning to murder one of the others), they've found two occasions in which astronauts were flying drunk. And drunk enough to pose a flight safety risk.

Some of the commenters below this story have said, basically, aww, let 'em drink--they're getting sent off on a dangerous launch and they're just along for the ride. Well, no--the commander and pilot do have some interaction they've got to do with the shuttle during launch. And in case of an abort at any stage, they've got to be ready. Furthermore, even the Mission Specialists and Payload Specialists, who could more be said to be along for the ride, would need to be ready to follow emergency procedures if there were an accident.

Should I be disturbed that there appears to be an actual phrase, "bottle to throttle"?

Explosion connected with SpaceShipTwo

There's been a nitrous oxide explosion at one of Burt Rutan's hangars at the Mojave Air and Space Port. Two dead and four injured. This is connected with the work going on to make SpaceShipTwo, Rutan's follow-on to SpaceShipOne, the winner of the X-Prize. There's more at the link.

Last stages on the US Attorneys firings non-scandal

Andy McCarthy has a great comment on the US Attorneys firings over at The Corner. Apparently even some Democrats are starting to realize this is all politics and not the law. I've been frustrated by how this has played out, with so much news coverage of it, when the Congress simply has no authority here. The Executive was entirely within its powers, and Congress couldn't change any of this, anyway, unless they tried a Constitutional amendment.

And on top of it, there's the chutzpah factor: these are the guys who defended Clinton when he fired every single one of the Attorneys, including the one investigating his Whitewater scandal. A lot of us suggested that was the real reason behind Clinton's blanket firing order, and it should have gotten more public attention. If Bush were firing someone who was investigating him, there should quite rightly be a public outcry, even if he was within his rights. But that's not the case, here.

McCarthy brings up a very interesting strategy issue here:

Congressional Democrats have tried to investigate it as if it were a crime. They've violated constitutional separation-of-powers principles by issuing subpoenas to some of the president's top aides. The White House wisely declined to comply, and Congress's next step is to try to hold them in contempt of Congress.

Only there's a small problem. The Constitution vests Congress with no authority to prosecute. That is an executive power. Congress can say "prosecute" all it wants. It needs a U.S. attorney to do it. But the U.S. attorneys work for the president. Flexing its constitutional muscles, the executive branch is not going to prosecute any contempt urged by Congress. Checkmate. Like this whole theater from the start, the issuance of subpoenas and the chatter about contempt is political, not legal.

Heh, heh, heh...

Now, I will say that I'm ashamed of the carelessness that Attorney General Gonzales seems to have shown in the firings--an unawareness of the reasons, whatever they were. And he's awful at handling things like this when the other side raises a public stink. His response should have been "Hey, this is lawful and within our power, and you can't say a thing about it, so buzz off" from the beginning. But instead, he acted like a weasel about it and, by extension, made the President out like a weasel. Don't come up with bad excuses, just state your case or tell them off, and leave it at that.

I've never been a big fan of Gonzales in general, because I think his politics are too wishy-washy, but the office of Attorney General should be relatively free of politcs anyway. But his badness at handling these sorts of problems just makes me cringe.

Sigh. We need a Donald Rumsfeld in that office.

Terrorist Logos

An excellent idea: putting together a collection of terrorist logos for easy identification. They're grouped by common symbols for easy reference.

The Sun and Global Warming

Andrew Stuttaford links to this article by an astronomer, about the Royal Society's annoucement regarding the sun's effects on global warming. It seems it's gotten misinterpreted by the press, or at least the BBC.

I might comment more later, but I'll say now that I'd first seen discussion of this in the late '90s, in an Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics article about the subject. The graphs of solar output and global temperature were shockingly (to me) close. While it might not be the whole story, it seems to me that to dismiss this without a lot of research is simply bias and unscientific close-mindedness.

(Link via The Corner.)

No Man-Eating Badgers in Basra?

The BBC confronts the British military with a tough accusation: "UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." (Via The Corner)

Riiiight! After eight years of Clinton, we in America learned how to parse government denials. So, maybe they *were* badgers, but only mildly ravenous, not completely man-eating. Or maybe they're man-eating wolves, tigers, or rabbits, not badgers. Or (and I think this is most likely) they *have* released man-eating badgers, but into the neighboring ZIP-code, rather than into Basra proper, and who cares if a few sneak into town on weekends?

I wish the British military had instead answered him, "Badgers? Badgers?! We don't need no stinkin' badgers!!

Is the Pope Catholic?

So, like, do I now belong to the "United Methodist Ecclesial Community"?

In all fairness, this isn't terribly new. It mostly restates the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's 2000 document, Dominus Iesus (although it seems to clear up some details, and it's more adamant in denying Protestants the honor of being called churches). And that, itself, wasn't terribly new in using this buzzphrase, "ecclesial community," which goes at least as far back as Vatican II's Lumen Gentium (well, there it's "ecclesiastical community"). It doesn't make the document's claims any more correct, from our point of view, but it does go back a ways.

I'm entertained to find that the criticism of this language goes back to the 2000 document. In fact, the "was this really necessary?" response amongst some Catholics goes back to that, too. The American Catholic article I linked to there could have been written yesterday. Interesting. Incidentally, I was hoping to be the first to use the phrase, "United Methodist Ecclesial Community," but it seems Mr. Switzer beat me to it!

So are Catholic priests and officials, in everyday conversation, really going to be saying things like, "the Methodist Ecclesial Community"? Surely not...right?

The Ethicist vs. Ethics

Randy Cohen, the New York Times' "The Ethicist," has been caught violating the paper's ethics rules on political donations. Giving money to MoveOn.org? I'm not surprised at all, and I'd assume plenty more journalists of one kind or another have done the same. But it is a nice little story, The Ethicist violating ethics rules.

Better still is Douglas Kern's funny story about this in National Review Online. Kern correctly points out that these donations rules aren't that wise: they don't prevent bias in their journalists, but only the appearance of bias. I've thought that for a while about a number of similar rules and attitudes in the government. A Supreme Court justice gives a speech that seems too political. Should he be prevented from doing so, to keep him unbiased? Or is the speech a reflection of his existing biases, not the cause of them? Clearly, it's the latter.

And Kern honorably points out the differences between a society worried about ethics and one worried about virtue and morality. In fact, he claims, it is the sign of moral decay if ethics becomes the primary concern, because it is merely a superficial thing and can cover up deep moral problems. A moral people won't have much need for ethical dilemmas.
That's my oversimplification, and I don't think that that is always true, or in all situations.

But I've been skeptical of The Ethicist and his advice for a few years, now. I used to listen to him regularly on NPR's Weekend Edition, and I remember one caller who was on drugs (marijuana) and had some question about his company's no-drugs policy. Cohen told him it was none of the company's business, and he seemed pretty emphatic about that. I've held his opinions at arm's length ever since then, but I'd failed to find much in the way of criticism of him, at least online.

Not a problem, now. And even his Wikipedia entry is pretty much against him. Wikipedia attracts all kinds of opinions to anything remotely controversial (and even some things that shouldn't be), but I was surprised he didn't have a lot of people writing favorable things about him.

[...] Cohen outlines his personal beliefs about ethics as being ultimately dependent on a person's immediate circumstances, while dismissing the notion that personal moral character might influence an individual's ethics.

Yeah...that's not helping my opinion of him. I don't care if he hasn't had "formal training in ethics" or philosophy; plenty of people could give good advice on the matter without formal training (preachers, for instance), and I sometimes worry that philosophy (certain philosophies, at least) tends to encourage people into immoral behavior. But it's what his advice actually is that bothers me.

Well, from the Wikipedia page, I have now found other critical articles on Cohen, like this one from Reason.

Tony Blair's exit

(Former) Prime Minister Tony Blair has resigned, to a standing ovation in the House of Commons, from both parties (Tory leader David Cameron got the opposition to rise, as well). A unique occurrence, from what I heard on the BBC. Blair is/was a "Third Way" politician who tried to transform the Labour party into something more centrist, much like Bill Clinton did in the Democratic Leadership Council here. At the same time, he changed so much of Britain's political character during his premiership, not all of it for the better. Still, we Americans will probably remember him best for his strong backbone on Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite fierce opposition in his own country, indeed in his own party, he agreed that these wars were the right things to do, and he stuck with us, even when Iraq became unpopular.

Archbishop Cranmer, no fan of Blair's in general, has a rather fascinating review of his legacy. Fascinating, because Cranmer criticises him in strong terms, and in the same post, has gentle words of praise and concludes that history will judge him better.

We'll see in a few years. I wish him well.

Hugo Grotius on Christian Tolerance

I'm reading Meletius, or, Letter on the points of agreement between Christians. This is a previously (before ~1988) unpublished work by the great, 17th-century Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius, best known today for formulating international law.

I was surprised to learn that Grotius was not just a jurist, but also a theologian and political philosopher. After the Dutch won their independence from Spain, the Protestants were free to practice their religion, but a new fight broke out between the Calvinist and Arminian schools of theology. The Calvinists had a majority and, in the end, outlawed the Arminian position. Grotius was a young government staffer at the time but already showing his promise, and he wrote a treatise on religious toleration and church-state relations, defending the Arminian "Remonstrants." Another time, he wrote the first major piece of Christian apologetics from a Protestant perspective.

Meletius is a kind of draft of the latter. It's short, about 30 pages, and he felt it was superseded by his later and more complete apologetics book (which is actually written in rhyming verse, in Dutch!). But it's still an interesting work in its own right. It includes some of the arguments on toleration, which are what interest me the most.

Surprisingly, most of Grotius' citations and arguments come from Classical Roman and Greek philosophers, rather than from scripture. Not that he's devoid of the latter (and he argues that philosophy and reason have to answer to revelation, rather than the other way around), but his background as a classicist really shows through. He likes to show how even the pagan philosophers crudely pointed the way to the Jewish and later Christian fullness of truth. This was true for some of the early church fathers, as well.

The bit on toleration is what interests me at the moment. He argues that Christians of different denominations agree most easily on questions of moral behavior, and they disagree mostly on doctrinal points. His position (if I've gotten this right) is that the dogmatic points can be taken down to a small number that we all need to agree on, and the rest laid to conscience. While it is the issues of moral behavior that we can be united in.

Hmm... Well, I don't think I've written that last part very clearly. It's probably basically true, as written, but Grotius' points are more detailed. OK, I'll post more on this later. I'm especially eager to read his treatise on church/state relations, and I'll blog about that, too.

Thompson's Foreign Policy Team

Fred Thompson is assembling a top-notch team of foreign policy advisors, according to the Weekly Standard. Mark Esper was Bill Frist's national security advisor. Joel Shin was on the Bush campaign's foreign policy staff for the 2000 race and is now with the Scowcroft Group. And there's Elizabeth Cheney, "principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiatives." What a title! She's been working on "market-based reforms" for those areas. All three are hawkish, which is good in my book.

Thompson has pulled ahead of McCain and even with Giuliani in the polls this week...and he's still not yet announced he's running! Stephen Hayes says he'll be on the Tonight Show tonight, so let's see if he makes an announcement then...

A thought on Intelligent Design

I posted a version of this in the comments over on Mark Shea's blog, and I think it's of general interest enough to repost it here:

I have a sympathy for Intelligent Design, but as a physicist, I think that the experimental evidence for this design can only come from looking at the fundamentals—the ultimate origins in cosmology and the nature of physical laws themselves.

This is only a suspicion of mine; I believe that, given the complexity of the interactions between the individual particles of matter, God can work directly in our world without our ever observing a violation of the natural laws. And with God knowing the future, He could arrange the intereactions needed for His purposes far in advance, so small changes have time to produce large effects.

So I doubt that we're going to look and find supernaturally-explained glitches in evolution.

On the other hand, the big-picture questions of "Why is the universe here at all?" and issues of "fine-tuning" for its habitability go back to the beginning of time and the moment of Creation itself. Science, physics in this case, necessarily works within the physical laws of nature. But the laws of nature are properties of the universe itself. So we are unable, even in principle, to use those laws to extrapolate backwards, past the moment the universe came into existence. Physics cannot answer the question, "What was there before the Universe?," unless it is to talk about our universe bubbling up out of another, pre-existing universe. But that only pushes the question back to the origin of that other universe.

What ultimately got the whole ball rolling, existence-wise? Physics will never be able to answer, because of the nature of science itself.