Oddities in voting

Huh, again. They allotted 11 minutes (I think) for the vote, but the clock ran out and they kept voting. I don't know just how their rules work on this. Apparently it's not like the clock in a football game. Right now it's tied at 203 vs. 203, with 28 members not yet voted. I would have thought that was the end of it, but C-SPAN just broke back in to give the rest of the night's schedule, and they said, "Assuming it passes, there will be one more hour of debate..." Okaaay...

Side note on TV

Huh. While they're voting in the House, I flipped over to the WB, and the guy who played Larry in "Perfect Strangers" is back in a TV series! I always liked him. Whatever this show is also has the younger daughter from "Roseanne," and at least in this episode, one of the ladies from the early Saturday Night Live. Forgot her name. She was in Feds.

Curious what show this is.

Procedural vote

They're voting right now. Party-line, except for a stray Republican or two voting with the Democrats. The vote is on "agreeing to the resolution," but I don't think it's a vote on the call to withdraw the troops. I think it's a procedural vote on whether to vote at all on the call to withdraw the troops. I'm a tad confused.

UPDATE: C-SPAN just cleared it up for me. It's a vote on whether to proceed with debate on this ultimate vote. Gotta keep up with these details!

One more on Pelosi

She led with with this comment she's made before about how her district (or California in general? I missed a word.) has more veterans per capita than any other part of the country. As if that makes her a pro-war hawk?!

If it's true at all, I've got to think it has to be just because there are a lot of sailors and airmen who were stationed in California and just stayed put after they retired. I'm really sure that soldiers, marines, and airmen are not more likely to be natives of California. I think they're generally Southerners. At least, I've always assumed so.

Stretch is up

Nancy Pelosi is up now. Bad recitation of movie lines: "You can't handle the truth" (this to the GOP). Work on your delivery and your Jack imitation.

Calls Murtha one of the most distinguished Congressmen ever to serve in the House. Oh, please. I'm sure he's basically fine, except for nutty ideas like this, but come on. How many outside of Pennsylvania had ever heard of the man before this week? Is he in a league with, say, Davy Crockett and the giants of Congressional history?

Continued liveblogging of the House

Jack Kingston (R-Georgia) just brought up Al-Jazeera's trumpeting of Murtha's pronouncement. He says that Murtha did not, of course, propose an immediate withdrawal (but rather over the next 1-3 months, I think). But, as he noted, the press, importantly including Al-Jazeera, twisted Murtha's words to say he was calling for an immediate withdrawal. Kingston said "it's not his proposal, but it is his headline." Boos from the Democrats.

Fun on C-SPAN

I raced home tonight to tune in to C-SPAN. (How often do you hear that?) Mark Levin, on his radio show, clued me in that there was a nearly knock-down, drag-out fight brewing on the House floor, debating Rep. Murtha's (D-Penna.) resolution to withdraw from Iraq within a few months.

I'm a little late into the debate to be liveblogging, but I'll comment on what's going on now, anyway. Gene Green (D-Texas) just said that "with every death in Iraq, we know that something is wrong," (or very close to that). That's pretty clearly incorrect. You don't fight real wars without deaths on your side. Yes, we carried out some limited fights under Clinton without deaths, but those were airstrikes only. No ground troops. The casualty rate is remarkably low in our current war.

George Miller (D-Calif.) just finished a long harrangue. He actually refused to shut up after several seconds of the Speaker pro tem gavelling him, telling him his time was up. I haven't heard anybody run on that long after being told his time was up. He got a round of applause from the Democrats, of course. The Republicans are, by and large, staying within their allotted times, or finishing up their sentences when gavelled. Most Democrats, too. But there are a few on the Democratic side who just refuse to follow the time restrictions. It ought to be embarassing.

A lot of the heated arguments out of the Democrats are that Murtha's character, honor, and dignity are being impugned. In fact, one Democrat said from the floor that even bringing this issue to a vote is itself a direct attack on Murtha! What blowhards. Yes, Murtha is going to be embarassed by this, and he should be. But I have heard not one Republican insult Murtha's character. I have heard plenty of Democrats insult the character of the Republicans on the other side of this particular issue. Murtha himself insulted Dick Cheney flat out, throwing in attacks on his not serving in Vietnam into his call to pull the troops out. The Republicans, in stark contrast, are avoiding any such personal insults. They have certainly questioned Murtha's judgement. They've said this is a very bad idea. And it is.

Need spare parts for your aging B-25 Liberator?

Then you might want to check out Hawkins & Powers Aviation's liquidation sale. Also for sale are some complete C-130 Hercules's and a Douglas A-26. Among others.

Me, I'm still holding out for a B-52. Or a B-17. Those things are beautiful.

Incidentally, this is my first time linking to the new, blog-driven Open Source Media (OSM) resource, formerly (or still informally?) "Pajamas Media."

New Testament in Gullah

Interesting linguistics/religion article on the AP today, via yesterday's Best of the Web. The New Testament has finally been translated into Gullah, ending a 26-year project. Gullah, for those of you outside the Southeast, is a black creole language of the islands off the South Carolina coast. The AP provides an example, John 1:1--

Fo God mek de wol, de Wod been dey. De Wod been dey wid God, an de Wod been God.

Now, from this excerpt, if you didn't know much about Gullah, you might think it was merely poorly-pronounced, ungrammatical English. In fact, it is a creole language derived in part from English.

This reminds me of a story I heard on NPR a few months ago, about translating the Bible into other languages. I think it was in a remote locale, where missionaries had first arrived only a few decades ago. They were working on a Bible for the locals in their own language, but there were debates over just how certain things ought to be translated to preserve the correct meaning. This is, of course, the perennial problem in translation, especially in Biblical translation. But what took me by surprise was the insistence of some that it would take a long, long time (decades more? a century? longer? I don't remember exactly) to really understand the local language well enough to put the Bible into it, so they shouldn't try now.

So...what, should the locals of this generation, and the next, and their grandchildren, simply do without the Word of God, until we clear up the subtle meanings of "logos" or "ra'ah"? Come on. The problem of expressing such concepts (I mean, better examples than the trivial ones I came up with) in a language that might not have them already is a problem that exists, even when you understand the language perfectly. Think of the long fights involved in English translations of the Bible, and that was by native English speakers who were schooled in either Latin, or the original languages of the Bible, or all of these. As a result, we wound up with new words being coined to express tricky concepts, and, especially in the King James version and its predecessors, Hebrew idioms were often translated literally into English. These have become so ingrained in our common speech now, that we are rarely aware of their ancient origins, instead thinking of them as native English. So I say, go ahead! Translate it as best you can now, and work out difficult concepts in Sunday school. They'll get it.

Anyway, this Gullah translation is a good project, and I wish them well on the Old Testament, which they might try next.

They really don't learn, do they?

Wow. I'm listening to Sean Hannity interview Dennis Kucinich on the radio right now. Dennis, he of the brilliant "let's create a Department of Peace" proposal, is running his mouth non-stop (Sheesh! The guy will not shut up!) about how Bush lied Bush lied Bush lied...etc. on Iraq. So Hannity reads him a pre-war statement he claims is from George W. Bush, declaring how bad Hussein is, how his nonconventional weapons are a threat, and how we can't trust him to sit quietly in Iraq and not collaborate with terrorists now that we're in a global terrorist war, and therefore we must invade.

Hannity has to repeat himself incessantly to get the former boy genius of Cleveland to close his mouth for five seconds, but he finally gets Kucinich to say that yes, Bush lied there. Of course, as Hannity quickly revealed, these were not Bush's words, but Hillary Clinton's. So did she lie, then?

Oh, noooo, of course not! You see, it doesn't matter if she said the same thing Bush was, because we didn't go to war on her word! [Side note: but wasn't it the Senate that declared the war? Even in the vague ways it's done today, they still did it. --ed.] Plus, she was misled by the evil dictator Bush, you see. Incidentally, he, Kucinich, was miraculously unmesmerized by Bush's hypno-ray that turned the rest of Congress into pro-war drones. [Sorry--been staying up too late at night with the Cartoon Network on. Lots of weird cartoons on at that hour, and hypno-rays seem par for the course.]

But to pull in my post title: don't these anti-war leftists ever learn? Even now, over the months and years that we've been pulling this little trick on them, why don't they figure out that the quote being read to them is by one of their own? Are they not paying attention to their pacifist brethren who have already been snookered? Or do they just lack the common sense to see this coming? Doesn't say much for Kucinich, at any rate.

San Francisco votes to crush Constitutional right

San Francisco passed a ballot proposition yesterday that takes away its citizens' right to keep handguns in the city. Absolutely outrageous. Armed citizens will be required by their friendly local jackbooted thugs (or whomever that city employs for such things) to surrender their handguns to the city next Spring:

Measure H prohibits the manufacture and sale of all firearms and ammunition in the city, and make it illegal for residents to keep handguns in their homes or businesses.
...
Although law enforcement, security guards and others who require weapons for work are exempt from the measure, current handgun owners would have to surrender their firearms by April.

Thankfully, the NRA's going to take the city to court, as California law prohibits her cities from passing such restrictions. Good for the NRA. More reason that people should join.

The Sage of Searchlight

Look, I know I'm coming late to fuming about Harry Reid, but would the guy please shut up? He's been all over the news, lying about Bush and the war and intelligence, and it's getting on my nerves. The Democratic leadership in the Senate is made up of hypocrites who back then called for Hussein's removal and who proclaimed that his development of weapons of mass destruction was intolerable. Now? They want to pretend they were always against removing Hussein, and they never believed he had or was developing nonconventional weapons, and Bush is Hitler for doing so on both counts! Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites.

The Republicans in the Senate need to publicize this deception. The Intelligence Committee (I think that's the correct one) has been proposing to cover prewar statements on Iraq without labelling the speaker! I love this idea. The Democrats have absolutely blanched at the idea they could be caught in their deception. Go for it, GOP. Push them--make them admit they're being a bunch of lying opportunists.

Yes, I'm ticked off. I'm fuming over this. Impugning my side's--and especially the President's--honesty on an issue on which they acted honestly makes me mad, and the GOP had better stand up for themselves.

So is Copernicus.

On a similar note, Copernicus is still dead, too. No, this is interesting--they've probably found his grave. He's buried underneath the altar of a Polish cathedral.

I was just teaching about Copernicus a couple of weeks ago. I'll have to tell my students about this.

And in other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco...is still dead!

The New York Times reports that the Mars Polar Lander (NASA's failed probe of six years ago) is still missing.

Actually, it's not exactly like the Saturday Night Live joke; apparently they'd thought they found it a while back, but it turns out the white blob they thought was its parachute isn't.

Venus Express is on its way

The European Space Agency's (ESA) "Venus Express" is on its way to Venus. Interestingly, they launched it on top of a Russian Soyuz rocket (that's what Space.com calls it; I'm not sure that that's the rocket's name, but probably only the name of the manned space capsule the Russians often put on top of this rocket. Not sure.

Anyway, ESA didn't use one of their own rockets--the Arianne, for instance--and chose a Russian launch instead. Wonder why? I think the Arianne's kinks have been worked out, after all.

The probe is ESA's first to Venus. It will orbit the planet; I haven't seen any reference to a lander. Venusian landers don't last too long--think minutes or seconds. The Soviets sent the Venera lander to the surface decades ago. I believe it is still the only probe to send back pictures from the surface.

E's coming?!

Hey, E! I just saw your post below, that you'll be heading back East next year. It's been a while since you've posted--glad to hear from you again. E-mail me at the NASA account; there's news to catch up on!

Distributing Bibles lands Chinese in jail

The Washington Times has a disturbing article on the three-year prison term China imposed on Cai Zhuohua for distributing Bibles.

I am not really surprised, of course, but I hadn't realized they were being this blatant about it. I remember in the '80s, that my church had collected Bibles to be sent to the Soviet Union, I think. We should see about something like that for China now. If there are Christians being persecuted there and willing to risk jail for distributing them, there's somebody willing to receive them.

I'll look up the organization, but my preacher did tell me about one place that smuggles Bibles into places like this. I'll post its name once I find it.

Another good article on Pluto's two additional moons

Space.com has a good, detailed write-up on the discovery of two more moons of Pluto. It adds details that aren't in the STScI press release I linked to yesterday. Still, though, it repeats this assertion that bugs the dickens out of me--the false claim that "Pluto isn't really a planet." No astronomer would ever say that Pluto isn't a planet. There are some who don't want to call it a "major planet," but any body that orbits the sun, even an asteroid, is considered planet of some class, even if only a "minor planet."

A friend who is a planetary astronomer argues with me over this point. He says Pluto should be considered just a big minor planet, because its orbit is more elliptical than the other eight major planets, and its orbital plane is the most unaligned with the others.

Point taken, but those are the only two criteria that make any sense. Others have tried arguing that Pluto is a minor planet because it's the smallest of the nine and because it probably has an ice composition, rather than rock (like Earth) or gas (like Jupiter). Neither of these are logical criteria. Pluto is the smallest of the nine major planets, but it is nearly as big as Mercury. Distinguishing between them in size would be arbitrary. (Furthermore, you'll always have one planet that's the smallest of any group. If Pluto were kicked out of the club, then Mercury would be smaller than any of the others. And would it then be kicked out? Then you'd have to proceed on to Mars, and then Venus, and so on. You could never stop.)

The other proposed criterion makes no more sense than that. We have the terrestrial (rocky) planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. We have jovian (gaseous) planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Why not a third category, that of ice planets? It's a solid surface, like that of Earth and Mars. Planets' compositions have only been understood within the last century or two (I guess), anyway, while since the beginning of history we have recognized Jupiter and Saturn as true planets, even though they're "just" big balls of gas.

Saying that Pluto is a member of the Kuiper Belt does not exclude it from major planethood. It is likely both. So what?

Ronnie Earle's logic on currupting influences

NRO's Stephen Spruiell has an insightful comment on the Tom Delay prosecution in Austin. Remember that the presiding judge in the case has just been told to recuse himself, because his political contributions to the Democrats and (more radically) MoveOn.org show a political bias that might work against Mr. Delay. Here's Spruiell:

What's even more ironic about Earle's opposition to recusing Perkins is that this whole case revolves around Earle's deep-seated conviction that campaign contributions have a corrupting influence on politics. Apparently, Earle wants us to believe that corporate contributions have a corrupt influence on politicians, but that a judge's campaign contributions to a politician's opponents do not affect his ability to judge that politician impartially.

Huh--I never thought of that before. Now, there is a difference here, in that Earle argues that the campaign contributions corrupt the people to whom they are given, not the giver. And in the judge's case, it is his contributions that are in question, not his receipt of money. But this is still an argument worth working on.

The Arab League's standards

Interesting article here on a scuttled offer of exile & sanctuary to Hussein in 2003. I honestly can't make much sense out of the timeline and who offered or rejected what (both sides involve the Arab League), but it's still interesting.

One telling bit of information about the Arab League's principles, though, comes at the throwaway line that ends the article:

Almost all the Arab League's member states are Sunni Muslim-majority countries and the pan-Arab body has kept Iraq at arm's length since the U.S.-led invasion, which most of its members opposed.

Hmmm...so, brutal, bloodthirsty. barbarous dictatorship? OK, you're a member in good standing in the Arab League. Increasingly democratic and free government with close ties to the United States, who freed you in the first place? Woah, buster! We don't serve your kind around here. Got to keep you "at arm's length," so we don't catch those democratic cooties.

Let's hope that after Lebanon cleans up their house, that Syria's next. Then Egypt, and on down the list...

A second and third moon for Pluto?

Space Telescope has a press release out, showing what appear to be two more moons about Pluto! A direct link to the picture is here.

The key is not that there are three (including Charon) little dots surrounding Pluto. On the basis of one image alone, you couldn't say that those weren't background stars. But in the second image, taken three days later, all three have clearly moved. If we get a few more images, taken at similar (or even closer) intervals, you'd be able to plot the orbits and tell for sure. I think three points can define an ellipse (orbits are ellipses, regardless of what angle they're viewed from). So you'd want at least four points plotted, to make sure. That means four images. We're half-way there!

Harry Reid comes out for discrimination

National Review's Bench Memos has a rather blunt quote from Harry Reid on Judge Alito:

For the third time, he has declined to make history by nominating the first Hispanic to the Court. And he has chosen yet another federal appellate judge to join a court that already has eight justices with that narrow background. President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club.

Did you pick up on that? Bush is to be condemned because he didn't pick a nominee from one particular ethnic group! If Alito were Oriental, would Reid have been satisfied? What about black? Australian Aboriginee? American Indian? No--Reid complains specifically that Alito is non-hispanic. Alito's parents (as I understand) immigrated from Italy. Apparently, he'd be acceptable if only they'd arrived from Spain, Mexico, or Ecuador. Bigot.

And this whole "looking [...] like America" line is an old retread from the Clinton days. Remember that his Cabinet was supposed to "look like America"? Didn't happen, of course. Not a conservative amongst them! Yet I've noticed there are a number of us conservatives in America. Even taking him to mean purely the racial, ethnic, and sex makeup of the Cabinet (how superficial!), it didn't happen.

Miers withdraws

Fox News is just now reporting that Harriet Miers has withdrawn her own
nomination for the Court. She did this soon after submitting her revised
answers to the Judiciary Committee. The President also released a
statement, referring to the Senate's desire for private documents of the
White House--what would fall under attorney/client privilige. The Senate
needed them to make a decision; the White House needed to keep them
private to protect legal advice.

It makes for an honorable way out for all involved. In fact, I think
this follows Krauthammer's proposed script from last week--using the
privacy of these documents, combined with her faint paper trail outside of
these, to give a pretext.

Bush isn't going to be in a chipper mood right now, so I don't expect him to be bending over backward to make us happy immediately. But I think he'll still do the wise thing in the next pick, going for somebody with the experience and philosophy to do a good job on the Court and to stand up for the written Constitution.

Incidentally, I think that one thing that dramatically hurt Miers in the last few days was the revelation of her speech of a few years back, in which she defended judicial activism. She actually said that it was excused when the legislature doesn't do what some wish it would...well, then it's up to a judge to do it anyway. That's the kind of philosophy we're trying to eliminate on the courts.

Fitzgerald's grand jury

For some reason, every time I see a blog refer to the Left's desire for Fitzgerald to issue indictments against Rove or Libby as "Fitzmas," I keep thinking of "Festivus" from Seinfeld.

Hmmm...Fitztivus??

So can the Telegraph get a refund?

Austin Bay covers the latest on George Galloway.

The trouble with Wilson

Here's a surprising article from the Washington Post, describing the problems with Joseph Wilson in the Niger uranium case and the revelations of his wife's CIA employment. It addresses his misstating the facts, and his egocentric, publicity-hound attitude. Surprisingly, it's co-written by Dana Milbank, no friend of the Bush administration. I tend to take an article like this more seriously when it comes from an administration critic, because the reporter has no interest in simply trying to make Bush look good.

I still have (or had) some regard for Wilson, as a result of his work in sheltering people during the Persian Gulf War, but he's pretty much blown it with me for his arrogance and lying or deception in all of this recent mess. What a blowhard.

Object lesson on why the ICJ would be a Bad Thing:

This article is Exhibit A. A judge in Spain has issued an "international arrest warrant" for three American soldiers. This comes from the incident in the Iraqi War (April 8, 2003) in which an American tank in Baghdad, thinking it was under fire, shot at a building that turned out to be the Palestine Hotel, where many reporters were staying. Three reporters were killed, including one Spaniard.

I think I saw this live on Fox News. I remember a rooftop camera watching one of our tanks moving through the city. The reporter narrating was saying something like, "Hey, here's one of our tanks--let's watch..." Eventually, you saw its gun barrel turn towards the camera (here I remember thinking, "You idiot cameraman! Get out of the way, stupid!"), but the cameraman didn't leave that spot. The tank fired, and there was a lot of shaking of the camera. I don't think the picture went blank, but rather it fell. The shell hit below the roof, as I remember.

The US Army wisely did not press charges against the soldiers. It said the use of force was warranted in that situation, where they thought they were under fire from the building. The Spanish judge, frustrated by what he calls a lack of judicial cooperation from the United States (No, really?! And thank goodness for it!) has decided to reach outside his country's jurisdiction and move on his own.

I'm sorry the reporters were killed. But it was an accident. It was in the enemy capital...during a shooting war. Does that mean nothing to these people? Can you imagine the reaction if this happened during World War II? A reporter sitting around in his hotel in Berlin in 1945, and is killed by a bomb or tank shell... Can you possibly imagine any judge outside the Axis countries issuing an arrest warrant for the men who fired the shot? Stupidity.

Red Light cameras causing D.C. crashes?

That's what I'm left wondering, after reading this article in the Washington Post.:

The number of District intersections deemed particularly dangerous by traffic engineers nearly doubled last year, a new study shows.

The city-funded analysis found that 330 intersections had at least 10 crashes, up from 176 in 2003.

Now, the article does not suggest that red-light cameras are to blame. And surprisingly, they don't even mention these cameras, except to say that

[D.C. police Inspector Patrick] Burke and other police officials have been strong advocates for red-light cameras and photo-radar devices, which take pictures of violators. The devices have generated hundreds of thousands of tickets, which are mailed to motorists.

That's it. A number of people, including Instapundit (although I don't remember where his exact post is), have raised suspicions, backed up by some studies, that red-light cameras can actually contribute to crashes. People don't know how strict the camera timing is, so they hit their brakes too hard, and the next guy rear-ends them. Why doesn't the Post's article mention this possibility? This is a huge rise in crashes in a really short amount of time. What has changed over this time period? I don't have the exact dates, but these traffic cameras came in about 2003 or so. Food for thought...

New books

I bought a couple of new books over the weekend and have started on them. First is Richard Feynman's Tips on Physics: a problem-solving supplement to the Feynman Lectures on Physics. It's a bit expensive, at $40, but it looks worth it, for the insight into showing physics students how to tackle a problem. Problem-solving is a tricky skill to pick up. It's rarely taught, and is rather expected simply to be picked up through osmosis or trial-and-error in the long course of studying physics. Missing the forest for the trees is a common problem to students, and professors often contribute to the problem by not organizing their lectures well. I've been at both ends of this, and I frequently struggle to find a way to explain problem-solving to my students. I reckon I might as well learn from the master, himself. Incidentally, the lectures in this book were taped, as all of Feynman's Caltech freshman physics was. The ones in this book were presented at the end of the year, before the final exam.

The other book is Madison Smartt Bell's Lavoisier in the Year One. The title first intrigued me. I remembered Lavoisier from my high school chemistry class. He and England's Joseph Priestly can both claim credit for the discovery of oxygen and for establishing chemistry as a modern science. Lavoisier, of course, lived in France, where despite being deeply involved in society under the old regime, he was an advocate of the French Revolution. It is this period that the title alludes to. The revolutionary government saw itself as perfectly rational, logical, and based on reason, in contrast to the old form of society, which it saw as too quirky, naturalistic (in my description), superstitious (their attitude on religion), and loaded with historical baggage. Examples of this include the creation of the metric system, that cold, unfeeling, and inconveniently-sized system of units that is still trying to push out our English system, which I think of as culturally tied, made to human and other convenient scales, and filled with interesting, comfortable quirks. (Wouldn't Shakespeare sound so silly if Shylock had demanded his half-kilogram of flesh? And imagine the "Charge of the Light Brigade" in metric: "Point-nine kilometers, point-nine kilometers, point-nine kilometers onward, All in the Valley of Death rode the Six Hundred...")

Among the changes to metric was a push to "reform" the calendar, to strip it of any religious, naturalistic, and historical ties. The year was to have months of three weeks each, each week of ten days, each day of 10 hours, each hour of 10 minutes, and so on. The months would be renamed to eliminate their historical baggage (I don't remember what those names were to be, and I don't speak French, but I think one was to be called "fructidor"--something to do with when you harvest crops?). And the coup de grace, the years would be numbered from the first year of the Revolution.

Despite his work on the metric system and his advocacy of the revolution, Lavoisier eventually lost his head, executed in the Reign of Terror. Killed by the very system he'd promoted. It promises to be an interesting biography and a study in how hyper-"rationalism" can run rampant, ignoring the restraints imposed by religion and history, to forget humanity and turn bloody. Men are rarely able to be forced into "rational" systems.

The culture of celebrity

John Epstein has a well-thought-out article on the culture of celebrity in the Weekly Standard. Not just the usual air-headed actors that we think of as "celebrities," but "public intellectuals" and writers, too. The best part of the piece is, I think, on the second page--when he gets onto intellectuals, professors, and writers. He doesn't spare himself in this description, either, which speaks well of his own attitude.

Religion vs. Society article: My first reading

I've downloaded Gregory S. Paul's article on religion vs. society (available here) and have been studying his statistical plots. My first impression is that there are some interesting results here, although not necessarily for the reasons the author thinks. The results do not support many of the claims made about it in the Times article I mentioned yesterday.

First of all, there are only four sets of plots that show a trend with some measure of religious belief:

1) "Accept human evolution" (anti-correlation)

2) "Under-five mortality/1000 births"

3) "15-19 year-old abortions/1000"

4) "15-17 year-old births & pregnancies/1000"


Furthermore, there are three sets of plots in which the US is a far outlying point, both in the measure of religion and in the other parameter, but the positions of other countries show no trend:

1) "Homicides/100,000"

2) "All age & 15-19 year-old gonorrhea infections/100,000"

3) "All age & 15-19 year-old syphilis infections/100,000"


Finally, there are two for which there is neither a trend, nor is the US an outlier:

1) "15-24 year old suicides/100,000"

2) "Life expectancy"


Interesting--in none of these plots is there evidence that religious belief correlates with any beneficial trends in society. Hmmm... Is it likely that that's really true? Heck, no! Maybe the author has picked those trends which he thought would show the results he wanted, or perhaps has eliminated (or not looked at in the first place) those which show beneficial correlations with religion. I've already mentioned below how there are some other measures of society that I'd have come up with long before some of these. How do they come out?

Furthermore, let's look at how some of these parameters might correlate with each other. Among the four plots that show a nearly linear relationship (the four in my first category), let's first cut out "Accept human evolution." That's not a cancer on society, like murder is. What are the remaining parameters in this category? Interestingly, all three of them deal with babies! We have teenage abortions, teenage pregnancies, and small-child deaths. Now, are these really independent parameters? I suspect that teenage abortions and teenage pregnancies would probably correlate rather well with each other. I have some idea that the deaths of small children might also be connected to this, but the first two are more obvious. Now, what should be done, rather than only correlating these with religion, look and see if these parameters correlate better with each other. If so, that would show that religion is not the variable driving the individual trends. It's sad the US shows high rates of these abortions and pregnancies and such, but it doesn't show that religion is the best correlation.

Now on to the second category, in which the US is an outlier (meaning it stands outside the trend or envelope of the other data points) but the other countries don't show any trend. OK, having two different sexually-transmitted diseases plotted probably doesn't add extra information. I would suspect that the gonorrhea and syphilis infection rates are closely correlated with each other. There is not a trend with religion shown in these plots. The US is an outlier on the infection rates, yes, and we're at the high end of religion, but all of the other counties cluster at low infection rates, and those show absolutely no trend with religion. Homicide rates are similar in this regard. The US and Portugal stand out at the high-religion end, and both have high homicide rates. Looking at the other 15(!) countries, there is no relationship between religion and homicde rates. Absolutely none.

Finally, we have those plots with no trends and without the US as an outlier: suicides and life expectancy. Suicides don't even show a hint of a trend. For life expectancy, you can imagine a low-quality anti-correlation if you ignore certain data points. It's easiest to do this on the plot vs. "Absolutely believe in God." In this one, Denmark and Japan are at or very near the low-religion end. Japan has the highest life expectancy (~80 yrs.), and Denmark has the second-lowest (~75.5 yrs.). Portugal, the second-highest on religion in this plot, has the lowest life expectancy, at ~75.3 years. The US is at the top on religion, and we are in the low-middle on life expectancy (~76.7 yrs.). To see a trend in this plot, you've got to keep the outliers Japan and Portugal in the plot but cut out the outlier Denmark. And no trend is visible even then, if you look at other measures of religious belief.

Incidentally, even in some of those plots that seem to show a trend, you don't see it if you look at different measures of religious belief, or the trend is severely muddled.

Finally, I notice that in throughout this study, the sample of countries changes from one plot to another! I realize that some survey data might not be available for all countries--that while you have the rates of childhood mortality for Portugal, you might not have the abortion rate, and so on. But this leaves open the possibility that those countries which do not appear in every plot...might spoil a trend in those for which they're not plotted. A better study would take only that subset of countries for which you have data for all the questions. That way, you're comparing the same ones in each case, and you can better control for other factors in society--things you haven't considered that might play a role.

To conclude for now: the only comparisons for which we see a clear trend (if we ignore belief in evolution) might plausibly related better with each other than they are with religion. For the rest of the study, knowing the religious belief of a country does notgive you the ability to predict other statistics about that country.

Who is Gregory Paul? (cont'd)

I'd been a bit confused in the post below by the number of Gregory S. Pauls out there on the web. It turns out that a few of them really are the same guy. The author of that anti-religion study seems to be a well-known evolutionary biologist and dinosaur expert. I found the connection from the "about the authors" paragraph on the back of his book, "Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds." To quote:

Gregory S. Paul is an evolutionary biologist, whose latest publication, Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, was a best seller and Book-of-the-Month Club selection. An artist of prehistoric life, Paul's dinosaur sketches were used in the movie Jurassic Park. He resides in Baltimore and is the author of articles and reviews on evolution and paleobiology in Scientific American, Bioscience, and The New York Times.

Well, this explains his obsession with public opinions on evolution in that anti-religion study he just published. The book I've just mentioned here also has a chapter on the death of religion after the cyberhumans take over (or whatever). So we know he's already got this mindset.

I don't see that his background makes him any expert on social science. I don't know that he's made blatant mistakes in his study, besides the possible flaws I've already pointed out, two posts below, but it does mean I don't see any reason to believe his results any more than a similar study I'd do myself.

Who is Gregory Paul?

UPDATE: I'm trying to find out more about that "Gregory Paul" mentioned as the author of the religion vs. society study I wrote about below. He's a hard man to find on the web. Well, probably just that "Paul Gregory" is a more common name (I keep running across "Gregory, Paul" in my Google searches instead), or that there are plenty of men with Gregory Paul ____ as their first and middle names. Now, I put the following into Google:

"Gregory Paul" social -music -dinosaur -hitt -photography -economics -walden -wegner

Excluding music, dinosaur, economics, and photography is to eliminate some rather prominent other Gregory Pauls (or Gregory Paul ___'s), and the surnames I excluded are for other people.

Here's what I come up with:

Political Futurists and Radical and Utopian SF Authors: Gregory Paul and Earl Cox, authors of Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds

Christianity and Fascism
From the reader comments at the bottom: "Your page on Christianity and Nazism, while interesting, is considerably plagiarized from Gregory S Paul’s article in the magazine Free Inquiry, Vol 23, No 4."

Extropy Institute (International Transhumanist Solutions) Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds (Gregory Paul)

Now, if I look for "Gregory S. Paul" -dinosaur -dinosaurs:

Journal of Religion and Society His article is available here. I note that he lists no affiliation, unlike many of the other authors. I suspect he's not on a faculty anywhere. The journal is refereed, it says.

The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis, By Gregory S. Paul This is the article that the "Christianity & Fascism" article above is supposedly plagarized from.


So...what can we conclude? That Mr. Gregory S. Paul (assuming I've identified the correct man in all of these cases) is an opponent of religion, at least of Christianity, and writes about futurist "trans-human" topics, like mind-transfers and self-aware computers. He seems to have no academic affiliation. Not that there can't be smart people outside of academia (plenty of them!), but I'm not used to seeing them write in refereed journals. I would suspect that his choice of statistical measurements could easily be influenced by his prejudices. Not that he can't do it right, since he has opinions, but I know where he's coming from before he's done the study.

A Christian society is a dysfunctional society?!

I read this really astounding article in the Times of London today. It is reporting on a study of some kind (its methods are not described in great detail) by one Gregory Paul. His institution or affiliation aren't listed in the article, but the journal is one called the Journal of Religion and Society, which is says is out of the United States. I don't know if it's refereed or not. Here's his big conclusion:

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Now, he does not come out and blatantly state that religion is the cause of all of this. The Times writer does, perhaps incorrectly (although I haven't read Paul's study to know): "RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today." And then there's, "But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills." Reporters very often make the logical error this writer does--that correlation means causation. It may be a mistake to conclude that.

However, if Paul is merely a dispassionate observer of the facts, you've got to get suspicious when he goes onto a rant on opinions about evolution and religion. Not something related to the behavior of society, but just his opinions about what it would take to get a wider belief in evolution here, etc. Then he throws in this smug little remark: “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.

Well, the "Old Europe" Europeans he's talking about certainly aren't in Christian states anymore, as far as I hear. I don't mean officially Christian, of course (some of them are official, I think); I mean in practice for society.

Now, I could believe that we do have higher rates of some of the things he mentions. Whether it correlates with religious belief or some better factor he hasn't considered...well, you'd have to do the study yourself. But I notice a couple of things just from this brief write-up. For one thing, he considered the relative murder rates of the US and Great Britain. Yes, we do have a higher murder rate, and we are a more religious society than Britain is. But the overall violent crime rate in Britain is well above what it is in the US, and Mr. Paul doesn't seem to have looked at that. A second point is that I think he's looking at our society at this one instant in time. Trying to make correlations between different countries with different societies (which often vary in complex ways not easily quantifiable) is...tricky. So what about looking at our own country over time. Compare the changes in religious belief (or church-going activity, which is the more easily measured) over the past many decades, and compare it to the changes in the crime rates, STDs, abortions, and so on. What would you find, then?

Comparing American Judeo-Christianity and America's societal problems with, for example, Japanese Shintoism (and Buddhism?) and their societal problems?...that's not an easy comparison to make! There are so many wild differences between the forms, beliefs, and cultural effects of these religions that I don't believe religiosity is a useful indicator for comparing these two societies. Now, yes, he does compare us with Europe, but note how he says that the differences between the US and other places are more marked when you compare us with (among others) Japan.

France, Japan, and Scandinavia are the best countries, in his mind, in their murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion. Note that "early mortality" is thrown in there. I wonder if that's more a function of nanny-statism in prenatal care? Seems out of place next to the behavioral problems--murder, sexually transmitted diseases, and abortion.

I've already discussed how murder is analyzed to the exclusion (as far as I know) of overall violent crime. Finally, the latter two both deal with sexual behavior. While I agree that both are bad to have in society, he apparently has excluded others that I would put in there: prostitution and children born out of wedlock, for example. If we threw those in there, how would Scandanavia and France rank? I don't know. Just asking.

One last thing that made me...well, alternately laugh and make a face: "[...] the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution." Wow! I've never before heard anybody make the claim that believing in a (The) Creator and believing in the process of evolution were mutually exclusive! I suspect the writer meant something like believing in a single, miraculous act of creation, rather than a gradual process like evolution, presumably driven directly by natural laws. For the record, I believe in the Creator and in the process of evolution. And I'd hope that even in Europe, most of the people believe in the Creator, regardless of what they think of evolution!

Anti-Americanism and jazz

NRO's Jay Nordlinger has a typically excellent Impromptus column today. In it, he relates a conversation with a Foreign Service officer--an American--who wasn't too fond of America. After Jay told him about another Foreign Service officer he knows, who was wanting to get his children back into the States to live a while (they'd grown up overseas and had never lived in their own country), this guy responded,

My guy snorted, “Yeah — introduce ’em to the joys of Burger King.” I let that slide. But later I asked him, “Do you really think that’s all there is to American society and culture? Burger King?” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that great institution, believe me.) Then this guy said, “Well, there’s jazz.”

“Anything else?” I inquired. He couldn’t think of anything.

Only jazz--that rang a bell with me. I had read some years ago that the French sometimes remark that the only thing America has actually invented is jazz. I gathered that they regarded any other "American" invention as really having been invented elsewhere and merely improved upon here.

Well, OK, some of the major things in modern life that we might naively think of as American inventions are, of course, from other countries. The automobile was invented (the first practical one) in...France? Germany? One of those two. And the steam locomotive is British.

But what about other aspects of modern transportation? The airplane? Well, that's pretty clearly American. The rocket? The Germans did a lot of great work on it, but the liquid-fueled rocket is American (Robert Goddard).

Let's go on to other high technology. The computer? That one had many fathers, and maybe that's what the French critics are getting at. But the first electronic digital computer was either the ENIAC (University of Pennsylvania) or the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (University of Iowa), depending on how you want to define your terms. Both American, regardless. Telephone? American. A Canadian immigrant did it, but it was after he came to America. Television? Also American.

The movie projector? Edison made great improvements to it, but I think it was two Frenchmen who did it first. But Edison invented both the incandescent light bulb and the record player.

In fact, if you want to go way back, to the beginnings of this country, you'll find Americans were already showing their ingenuity, with Benjamin Franklin alone responsible for all kinds of things, from bifocals to the Franklin stove.


But let me get back to jazz. Even if you want to look only at music, it's hard to claim that jazz is the only American invention. Music, much more than physical implements, is the product of evolution and varieties of influences, so that it can be harder to pinpoint a new style's "invention." But let's give this a try with some other genres. Blues--invented around the turn of the century (1900) or a bit earlier in the upper Mississippi Delta. "Discovered" by W. C. Handy a little south of Memphis (in Mississippi) in 1903. Rock & Roll--invented in 1948, also in the South. The first rock & roll song was "Rocket 88" (I've forgotten the group's name). Country & Western music--whew...old enough in its various forms it'd be hard to pinpoint when it became what it is now. But we can certainly say that bluegrass music is a product of the mid-century South. Under that name, it was specifically created by Kentucky's Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. Still, his was an incremental change from what he simply called "mountain music," and that was traditional Southern, backwoods fiddle playing and the like, ultimately with Scottish & Irish roots.


Coming back to the comment that inspired this post, I wonder if jazz is the anti-American's one concession to American ingenuity? Do anti-Americans go for jazz more than other people do? Dunno. Just strikes me as funny that this pops out of not only anti-American Europeans' mouths, but an anti-American American's, too.

More on Disasters and Federalism

Following up on my post below, here's a great article by Cato's Chris Edwards on NRO.

Federalism and natural disasters

Former Virginia governor James Gilmore is on Fox News right now, against former Texas Congressman Martin Frost. Frost is proposing all kinds of anti-Federalist, unconstitutional ideas for disaster response, mostly involving the Feds telling the states and counties and cities what to do (and forcing them), and having the standing Army (I mean, as opposed to the National Guard) take command in disaster areas.

Yikes! this scares me.

Gilmore is doing a great job standing up to these wrong-headed ideas, reminding Frost that the Army can't take law-enforcement duties, and explaining how it's not the Federal Government, but the states and local governments who have the principal responsibility in case of a disaster. Good job by Gilmore.

I think it was Frost on Fox over the weekend who was discussing how the Federal Government would pay for all of this. He doubted that Congress would be willing to cut enough other spending to meet the needs (good question!). So...he proposed a 10-cents tax (on gasoline?). Now, since I was stepping into the room as he said this, I'm not sure I heard correctly, but if he was really suggesting raising the gas tax by 10 cents, that's a really boneheaded idea. Gas is almost painfully high, as it is. Raising the tax on it will raise the price of everything that is shipped by truck, as well.

The best part (I am being sarcastic) was his insistence that paying this tax would be patriotic! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, paying higher taxes is the patriotic thing to do. I suppose that wanting lower taxes is therefore unpatriotic? Jerk.

NPR: It's not just for elitists, anymore!

More on that NPR Ombudsman's article I wrote about below.

You've got to read the first listener's comments to Dvorkin. Oh, my goodness, what unrestrained, self-unaware, liberal elitism! Get a load of this:

I have been moved to tears by the various heartbreaking stories and predictions. I am so angry at your revelations about our administration's bumbling I cannot speak of it in civilized tones. And your stories that show the extraordinary heroism in everyday people allow me to hope we will survive this crisis.

While mainstream media have been sensationalizing, over-simplifying, trivializing and sometimes obfuscating the hellish reality of a once-great city, NPR, in its quiet, calm and authoritative tones, has delivered the Truth.

Never, never, never let anyone say "NPR is for elitists." Without NPR... the rest of the country would be startlingly ignorant. God bless you all, and the vital work you do.

Let's dissect this, shall we? (1) "...your revelations about our administration's bumbling..." Yes, that's what comes across in NPR's broadcasts. Haven't heard much about Nagin's bumbling, or Blanco's bumbling, have we? See my post below for a specific instance of this blindness. And despite the left going on with criticisms of the Feds in Katrina, I still don't know what they supposedly did wrong. Was Federal help any later than the states have long been told? Feds are not and should not be first responders. Was there a breakdown in the Federal work? I hate FEMA's bureaucratic mindset--making firemen pass out fliers at shelters, rather than rescue people, or having them go through PC sensitivity training for hours, rather than get their assignments and get to work...handing out fliers... But of the practical stuff they've been doing, what did they screw up on?

(2) "While mainstream media have been sensationalizing, over-simplifying..." So NPR isn't part of the mainstream media? Funny, I always thought they were. Do you have to sell advertising to be mainstream? (Of course, they do sell ads, to an extent) Does being on the radio automatically make you out of the mainstream? Face it, lady, NPR isn't that different from ABC, CBS, or NBC, except that NPR is still on the radio, while the big three networks have their shows exclusively on the TV, nowdays. Another example of the left trying to take a term used by the right and twisting its meaning for their own purposes. Like Schumer's redefinition of "activist judge."

(3) "NPR, in its quiet, calm and authoritative tones, has delivered the Truth." Oh, for heaven's sake!! Gag me.

(4) "Never, never, never let anyone say 'NPR is for elitists.' " Snort, giggle! Hee, hee! OK, maybe this statement is supposed to be self-evidently true. Because if it's presented as following logically from the previous lines, I just don't get it. Oh--but the best part is when you keep this sentence in mind while you read her next statement:

(5) "Without NPR... the rest of the country would be startlingly ignorant." Oh, for goodness sake! NPR is not for elitists. And without it, everybody else would be "startlingly ignorant"! Can I please get a big towel in here to wipe off the condescension dripping from her tongue?!

NPR, too

This article by NPR's ombudsman is notable for his willingness to criticize the bias in the BBC. But reading the part above that section, I was struck by his unwillingness to admit to NPR's biases. One listener writes to complain about All Things Considered's Hurricane Katrina timeline, aired Sept. 9. I heard the same broadcast, and I had a similar reaction. NPR did a great service in putting together such a detailed timeline of what happened, both in the storm and in the responses to it. But it was typical NPR liberalism in how it left out some items or phrased others to lead you to an opinion about them.

The first thing I noticed was how they left out the details surrounding New Orleans' failure to plan for the evacuation of citizens who had no cars (I'm thinking of those schoolbuses they kept idle, until they were flooded and useless), and then the Lousiana Dep't of Homeland Security's preventing the Red Cross from distributing food to refugees in the Superdome (I think it was the Superdome), because Louisiana DHS wanted the people to go elsewhere. Now, the latter might have some reasoning behind it, but it's an important issue, and listeners should have been told. The former doesn't have any excuse. Incompetence and a failure to think ahead are not excuses. And listeners should have been told.

The second thing I noticed was how Bush was portrayed as out of touch, and his relevant department secretaries as clueless, by the subtle (and sometimes unsubtle) phrasing of the sentences. Juxtapose two items to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship, or to suggest that A should have reacted immediately to B (after all, the listener just heard the cleaned-up timeline relayed in twenty minutes, and it all seemed to simple--why shouldn't everybody else have gotten the picture at the time?!), and you can suggest all kinds of conclusions that are not stated outright. This is bias, too. Lousiana Governor Blanco came across in the timeline as blessed with great foresight and management skill. Watching the news elsewhere, though, and watching her press conferences, I've gotten a very different impression of her. Not a great crisis manager. Same with Mayor Nagin. An honest man, and probably great for cleaning up corruption, but he can't handle a crisis. He doesn't plan properly, and he makes excuses.

I have some criticisms of Bush and the Federal Government in all of this, and I'm not putting all of the blame on New Orleans and Lousiana, but NPR shaded the news in their broadcast. Despite Ombudsman Dvorkin's protestations, All Things Considered did place blame, in their timeline. They didn't say, "Blame Bush," but rather, they left out facts and phrased others so that the listener would think this was the proper conclusion.

$%&^#*! BBC commie!

Am I exaggerating? Read it, and judge for yourself.

Relevant excerpts:
"The real question - putting it baldly - is whether there is going to be a revolution." [Of course, I don't think he's specifically thinking of a violent revolution. --Ed.]

Charity is part of the warp and weft of American life and it is telling that Hurricane Katrina has encouraged an outpouring of giving on a scale never seen before. [...]

Americans have given with unbridled enthusiasm and generosity.

Is that not something governments do?

Americans do not think so and never will.

This is unquestionably a source of strength and spine in troubled times, but boy does it put a dampener on revolution.

Charity ameliorates it, softens blows, pours oil on troubled waters. It does not lead to social change.

Ron Silver's UN Movie

Instapundit also directs us to this new documentary by Ron Silver, about the UN. Silver, you'll recall, is a hawkish Hollywood Democrat (maybe former Democrat?) who gave a really impassioned, stirring speech at the last Republican National Convention. I'd call him a conservative, but really he's in-between. He's more liberal on social issues. Nonetheless, it's great to have him on our side, overall, and terrorism is, of course, the most important issue of the day.

Silver has made a documentary on the repeated failure of the UN, called "Broken Promises," just in time for the East River Debating Society's 60th anniversary. Silver grew up in awe of the UN. He talks about the "sense of pride" he felt in the organization. But then he saw the body's long string of failures--either from neglect or from a refusal to take sides. Israel, Kashmir, Bosnia, Rwanda... All places where the UN has dropped the ball.

The movie is coming out on DVD. I hope it'll be widely available soon.

Victory on New Orleans gun confiscations!

Instapundit and Say Uncle direct us to this NRA press release. The NRA has won a restraining order in Federal court against the confiscation of guns in New Orleans. Yes!!

And Dick Cheney's in on it, too!

The nut mentioned below has more.

Scroll down to "April 15, 2004 0705Z." Dick Cheney's "shadow government" is in collusion with the aliens, apparently.

Space Weather Nut

I've seen a couple of references in The Corner to this guy Scott Stevens, a weatherman in Idaho. He's some kind of nut, from what I've read about him and from him. Thinks that Hurricane Katrina was caused by a Japanese "weather machine," and he's got some oblique references to the sun being used/abused/exploited by space aliens. He's got photos of "solar torpedos or a fleet of smaller vessels" surrounding the sun and sending "their workers by the thousands to OUR Sun!"

Oh, boy...where to begin? His photos are from the SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory) observatory--a space-based observatory of NASA's that looks at the sun. He doesn't seem to understand what SOHO is. He's got a Scientific American article on the vibrations in the sun and how those might be connected to solar activity. Then he asks,

Is this what our SOHO ships are up too? Is this what these ships acting as magnetic/ultrasonic tools are doing... adding the until now unexplainable solar energy. Food for thought. And so many of them, day after day after day!

1) We don't have SOHO "ships." We have one single SOHO spacecraft. Not a fleet of them.

2) His whole question is a non-sequitur. Unless he's assuming that SOHO is causing activity on the sun. And if he thinks that the things he sees in the solar pictures are fleets of SOHO "ships"...


Then he shows several photos of the sun from SOHO's cameras. In each of these, he's zoomed in on image artifacts and seems to think that these are space ships--either alien or NASA. Although I'm not a solar astronomer, I've got a lot of experience in image analysis from another observatory, and I can explain what he's seeing.

Let's start with the image captioned "Jan 20, 2004 1042Z." Stevens writes, "Every minute of every day, for many years now, a great number of 'ships' travel to our Sun and to this Solar System. Why? And why haven't we been told?" This is a coronagraph image from SOHO. A coronagraph is a camera that blocks the glare of direct sunlight with a little metal disk (making an artificial eclipse), so you can see the fainter light of the solar corona--the atmosphere far above the sun. He seems to be looking at the blip (near the center of the image) which has an artificial-looking horizontal bar going through it. Stevens thinks this is a space ship. Actually, this is either a star or planet. It is overexposed in this photo, and the line through it is simply "blooming" in the CCD chip. CCD chips (digital cameras use these instead of film to record the image--light hits the chip and creates an electric signal in the pixels) have a maximum brightness that they can take. If a pixel is exposed to light brighter than this limit, there's a spilling of the electric charge from this pixel into the adjacent pixels in the row. The more the brightness limit is exceeded, the farther down the row the spillage goes. This happens to SOHO's coronagraph very often with planets. Sometimes with bright stars, I think. And then you occasionally get sun-grazing comets, and they can show blooming, too.

He might also be talking about the diagonal streaks in the image. These are cosmic ray tracks. Cosmic rays are high-speed protons (and some other subatomic particles) moving through space. Unfortunately for us astronomers, CCD cameras also make great cosmic ray detectors, and these make streaks in the image as they hit the camera. Cleaning these up is an important step when we use the Hubble, but we have ways to do so, by taking multiple exposures--the cosmics won't be in the same place in each picture, while the real subjects of your photo will be. SOHO runs its cameras in something like a movie camera mode, so they can't easily do this, and the cosmic ray tracks are left in.

The next photo is captioned, "January 30, 2004 0954Z / Large ships, very large ships, representing other civilizations bringing their workers by the thousands to OUR Sun!"

This is a different coronagraph on SOHO. It's zoomed in more than the coronagraph above. Here again we see CCD blooming. In this case, it's not a planet or star, but a bright spot in the corona itself.

The next photo is "March 13, 2003 0106Z / Solar torpedoes or a fleet of smaller vessels, and other tools are altering the Sun, and during that process changing the life process within this Solar System."

Here we see an image from one of SOHO's x-ray cameras (I think it's x-rays...maybe ultraviolet...). The sun presents a spectacular view in this wavelength. You can make out the shape of the magnetic field sticking above the "surface." Sunspots are associated with places where the magnetic field pokes out of the photosphere (the "surface" of the sun), so where you see the brightest spots here are, surprisingly, the dark sunspots we see in normal, visible light. Stevens again seems to refer to the blooming around a bright spot in the image, as well as a large cosmic ray track. Again, these are perfectly normal defects in these kinds of pictures. I ought to post some of my quasar images from the Hubble and show how these "Solar torpedoes" are clearly patrolling distant galaxies, as well!

Gun Seizures in Louisiana: NRA Fights Back

Good! The Washington Times writes that the NRA and the "Second Amendment Foundation" have filed suit in Federal court to stop the gun seizures by New Orleans police of private citizens in the city. I don't know about making it a Federal issue (wouldn't suit in state court be appropriate?), but I'm glad they're doing this. Thanks to them both for standing up for our rights!

"Stuck on Stupid"

This is...beautiful...sniff!

I've only read the transcript, but Radio Blogger (linked above) has an MP3 file, as well. There's plenty of commentary on VodkaPundit's website.

Connecticut Gov. Halts New London Property Seizures!

This is wonderful! The governor of Connecticut has forced the city of New London to stop evicting the citizens whose property it wants to seize for redevelopment. This is all fallout from the Kelo vs. New London case, where the Supreme Court dropped the ball. Three cheers for the governor, who is taking his own action to prevent the problem. I've been impressed with the states' reactions to the case--so many of them are acting to limit eminent domain legislatively. Connecticut has not (apparently) done that yet, but while they debate the topic, the governor has told New London they won't get some state funding if they continue with their greedy plan. Good job!

NASA's new plan for manned spaceflight

And no, I refuse ever to use that stupid, PC monstrosity, "human spaceflight." (NASA, ever the political animal, has immersed itself fully in that well.) "Manned" is the appropriate term. What, are we trying to distinguish the shuttle program from our parallel monkey space program these days?

Oh, right--the point: NASA has revealed its design for the next manned spacecraft, to follow onto the Shuttle. It's an expendible craft with a re-entry capsule, in the mold of the Apollo program. Space.com has a picture gallery here. As I heard on the radio, the astronauts and cargo would be launched in separate rockets, to dock in orbit.

Now, the most intriguing aspect of the new program is that it has the goal of returning to the Moon! I'm a big fan of our manned solar system missions. I want us to return to the Moon and head on to Mars, both. Actually, I'd like to be the first man to set foot on Mars, but I'd settle for being the next man back on the Moon.

Now, I'm a fan of the shuttle program, but I agree that it's gotten too complex for the economics. It was supposed to cut costs by reusing the spacecraft, and to make space travel routine. But as the most complex machine ever built, and with the government bureaucracy running the whole thing, it didn't have the lean operation it was intended to. The cost per launch is in the neighborhood of $500 million (there are a lot of assumptions in that figure, but it's the most common number I see used). A private company has already made it into suborbital manned flight, and I expect them to make it into orbit within a few years. They'll probably do it with less overhead than NASA. One hopes they'll be followed by a legion of competitors, pushing them to improve all the time.

So at this point, it makes sense for NASA to revive the expendible rocket program for manned flight. The technology is old, well-proven, and reliable. And it's probably cheaper, even if you don't reuse everything.

If you go to NASA's home page today, they'll direct you to the new program's press release, flash and video resources. I'm also providing a link here to the plain ol' press release (with pictures). Take a look!

Who's the Mayor of New Orleans?

Look, I agree that it there might have to be a second evacuation of New Orleans, if Rita winds up hitting her. And I'm impressed so far with Allen, the new head of FEMA, as far as his getting his agency's operations running smoothly.

But we have a Federal system. The states are sovereign, except for foreign policy and a few other limited items. The Federal Government cannot stick its nose into the rest. And Allen has got to remember that he's not the mayor of New Orleans. He can't order an evacuation. And on those kinds of big decisions, he's got to remember his place. He can help, but he can't order the people or their government around.

If I lived in New Orleans, I'd be moving back in as quickly as I could. I'd want to get right to work cleaning up my house and property and fixing what had been damaged by the storm or the looters. I'd especially want to get any holes in the roof patched up before Rita came along, so I didn't lose the rest.

Allen's carping on, saying people shouldn't come back because (among other things) there aren't working traffic lights...yeesh! I've driven in parts of town with the traffic lights out before, and people tend to work these things out very well. I've found them to be invariably polite and well-organized about that kind of an intersection. Come on--you just treat it as a four-way stop! Does Allen think that the entire continent was unfit for human habitation, before electricity was invented?!

Again, all this being said, it's going to be harder to get the word out to people if you need to evacuate because of Rita. I'm not saying to return to New Orleans if you've just got to turn back around tomorrow. I'm just saying that the Feds can't run roughshod over the sovereignty of our cities and states. And I'm happy Mayor Nagin reminded him who's boss in the city.

(And all that being said, I'm still not impressed with Nagin's disaster-preparedness or management skills. An honest mayor, yes--he's supposedly been good on the anti-corruption front. Just not a big crisis leader.)

Photo-doctoring at CAIR

Oh, my goodness! This is such a shockingly bald-faced fake, I can hardly believe it. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had an interfaith rally in DC, and they posted a photo of it on their webpage. Arrayed behind the lectern are seven people (of, apparently, different faiths), three of them women. In the foreground are three women and a man, all facing the speaker and looking away from the camera. All six of the women in the photo are wearing Moslem headscarves.

Except they aren't. Only two of them were; the other three had "scarves" painted on, in the picture! The apparently East Indian woman behind the speaker has the most obvious fake. I mean, man, you could do better with a ball-point pen than this Photoshop genius did to the digital photo here. I've seen fake goatees and mustaches scrawled onto pictures by elementary-school kids that were more realistic and had more detail.

But that was only the one that tipped people off. Much closer in the foreground are two women who appear to be wearing the same. But both of their "headscarves" are just Photoshop-copied replicas of the one on another woman. In fact, one of the women is blonde.

Now, I'm sure there are blonde Moslems, somewhere in the world, but they're surely few and far between, at least as a percentage. And given that the lady behind the speaker looks East Indian, there's a decent chance she's not Moslem, either. (Actually, India has as many Moslems--even more, until very recently--as Pakistan, but they're a smaller percentage of the total.) So CAIR has taken it upon itself to draw headscarves on three women at an interfaith event who did not choose to wear them.

Well! Sharia will be imposed on you virtually, even if you don't comply in reality!

CAIR has now posted the (apparently--unless people look and find more shennanigans at work, here) undoctored photo on their webpage, and the Google cache has similarly been "updated."

The revelations here come from Jihad Watch, via Instapundit. The much more skilled Photoshop experts at Protest Warrior have done excellent work by creating several different varieties of this fake. My favorite might be the Carmen Miranda fruit-bowl hat, but the Wagnerian Viking helmet is really good, too.

My goodness, CAIR! Can you not tolerate the fact that we infidels don't force our women to cover their hair in public?! You actually have to pretend that any woman, anywhere, in this free country actually wears your religion's headcovering? Sheesh--could you imagine how ridiculous it would be if, say, Hillel held an interfaith event and doctored the photo so all the men seemed to have on yarmulkes? Ooh--or a Mennonite group had the event and Photoshopped in the white bonnets onto all the women's heads!! Or if we Methodists held the event and...well, maybe we'd just Photoshop out the headscarves.