Economics, globalization, gambling, and the world cup

There's an interesting discussion on these lines over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Space shuttle Discovery begins countdown for July 1 launch

The space shuttle Discovery began its countdown yesterday for the anticipated July 1 launch. This will be the final shakedown flight before normal flight operations resume, as long as the flight goes well. Right now, there's some bad weather looming, though:
"Discovery's STS-121 spaceflight is set to launch toward the International Space Station (ISS) from Pad 39B at 3:48:37 p.m. EDT (1948:37 GMT) on July 1. Current forecasts call for a 60 percent chance of poor weather on launch day, NASA said."

Well, here's hoping the skies clear up in time. Actually, though, some colleagues of mine are hoping they purposely delay the launch a while longer, as they've heard there are still some unresolved problems with the shuttle. I haven't gotten a clear picture of how reliable these reports are. On Fox & Friends this morning, someone cited a chief engineer(?) at NASA who had supposedly been fired for saying it wasn't yet safe to fly. I can't imagine NASA would actually do that, if it was someone expressing a sincere concern. Especially these days. But the person being interviewed indicated that this engineer is now saying something different, and that it was an argument over an unrelated issue, and he wasn't actually fired. Well, I'll trust that the guys in charge know better the state of Discovery than I do...

My real hope is that this flight proves successful and shows that the entire fleet can go back into regular operation soon, so that we can get the Hubble repaired. We've got gyroscopes to be replaced and new cameras to install (COS--the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph), if we want to keep the HST up and running for several more years. With last week's shutdown of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, I'm getting a bit nervous about the long-term health of our observatory.

The UN and gun control, again

Via Instapundit, here are two reports from Cam Edwards on the UN's conference on Small Arms and Light Weapons: first and second. This is the conference in which the UN has been hoping to restrict private ownership of firearms around the world. A beautiful thing happened this week: the US representative (Robert Joseph, the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security) told the assembled nabobs to go stick it. In so many words.

"The U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of our citizens to keep and bear arms, and there will be no infringement of those rights,” he proclaimed to the dignitaries and functionaries. “The United States will not agree to any provisions restricting civilian possession, use or legal trade of firearms inconsistent with our laws and practices.”

That's the spirit! Anybody think we would have gotten this statement two administrations ago?

Check out Edwards' regular reports from the conference, so we can keep a close eye on this bunch.

Pluto's "new" moons get named

See my usual caveats on the International Astronomical Union, but regardless, there's some happy news this week (actually, a week ago): Pluto's two newly discovered moons have gotten named "Nix" and "Hydra." The link here goes to the press release at Space Telescope, which also has photos of the moons. Click on "Full Story" to get more details on the naming.

From the full press release:

In Greek mythology, Nyx is the goddess of the night. Among her many offspring was Charon, the boatman who ferried the dead across the river Styx into the Underworld. (Because asteroid 3908 already bears the Greek name Nyx, the IAU decided to use the Egyptian equivalent, Nix, for the name of Pluto's moon.) The mythological Hydra was a nine-headed serpent with poisonous blood. The Hydra had its den at the entrance to Hades, where Pluto and his wife Persephone entered the Underworld.

Also interesting is that the discoverers were looking for names beginning with "N" and "H," partly to honor the "New Horizons" mission which will fly to Pluto, and "H" does double duty in also honoring the Hubble Space Telescope, which was the observatory they used in the discovery. Pluto itself was named in a similar way--"P" and "L" honor Percival Lowell, who began the search for Pluto, which was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh at the not-coincidentally-named Lowell Observatory.

The UN and gun control

Despite the UN's proclamation that it's not trying to meddle in private gun ownership, it sure seems like it is. I think they've said at one point that they were just trying to restrict insurgencies. John Lott has an article on the topic here, mostly reminding us that not all rebellions are bad. (1776, anyone?)

One junior college radio station changes format, and it's a NY Times headline?

Yes, I'm sure this is worthy of the front page (online, anyway) of the New York Times.

A junior college in Kilgore, Texas, is selling its radio station, which will not cease to exist, but will simply change format from a "public radio" station playing classical music to a Christian contemporary format. Of course, from the Times' phrasing, you'd figure there was going to be a big, gaping hole in the radio spectrum all of a sudden: "The loss of KTPB would leave the Tyler folks the most bereft (to the east, some receive Shreveport's public radio station). No more Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. No more New York Philharmonic." People suddenly bereft?!! Noooooooooo!

Of course, they didn't interview anybody who liked Christian contemporary and was happy to find that he'd get more of his kind of music. It's as if there is only one kind of music out there, and it will suddenly cease to exist. If it's not in Kilgore, it's gone...forever: "The loss of a classical KTPB would be the latest footstep in the decline of classical music radio in the United States."

And then there's this scary statistic: "In 1990, about 50 commercial stations were on the air; the number is closer to 30 now." Wait--wasn't this a public radio station being sold? Is that counted as a "commercial station"? I wouldn't have thought so, but maybe the Times' reporter has mixed his terms, accidentally. Or maybe he's really citing a different statistic that doesn't apply in this case. I can't tell.

Look, I love classical music, and I prefer it to Christian contemporary. I like stations like this one being sold in Kilgore, except when they're yammering on for a week at a time, trying to bore me into becoming a "member," rather than selling honest advertising to make their living. "...the station has a meager 650 members. 'People want things, but they don't want to pay for them,' he said. 'It's not unique to the arts.'" Huh?! This is radio. You can build a crystal radio receiver for $10 and pick up the vibrations in the aether, free of charge. (Or you can buy a little AM/FM set premade for probably $5. Whichever.) It's always been this way. And radio stations have always realized that they were giving their broadcasts free to the public. You make your money by selling advertising. You don't imply people are stealing your precious electromagnetic squiggles if they don't volunteer to send you money.

Oh, but as I was saying, I'd be disappointed, too, if I lived there. I prefer classical music, and I'd miss having this station play my kind of music. But how is this a national issue? It's not. And it's not as if "Music" will cease to exist, either in Kilgore or throughout the country, if this sale goes through. It will simply be a different kind of music.

While we're at it, can we please finally get the Corporation for Public Broadcasting eliminated, or de-Federally-funded, or whatever? Why does my tax money go to pay for radio stations? We have a free press, and that should also mean the press is free of Federal money. Federal funding for radio stations is, quite astonishingly, not accounted for anywhere in the Constitution. Huh.

Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera shuts down

Geez I'm out of the loop this week. I'm an astronomer who uses Hubble data, but it was my parents who informed me about this one. The Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the main imaging camera (redundanciness, there?--I mean, one that's not part of a spectrograph), has shut down, as of Monday last week. Rather than give you a watered-down summary from a newspaper, let me just copy the official notice from the Space Telescope Science Institute itself:

ACS Suspends Operations

On Monday, 19 June 2006, at 1:15 pm EDT (17:15 UT), the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) issued status buffer messages indicating that the +15V and +5V power supply voltages in the CCD Electronics Box (CEB) were above their high limits, causing the ACS to suspend. This event occurred in a period with no ACS commanding and outside the SAA. A dump of the relevant data showed that a total of 36 CEB items exceeded limits at the time of the event.

At this point, the ACS is in a safe configuration, and further analysis is ongoing. Preliminary reviews of the telemetry and technical details about possibly affected components of ACS have been carried out. However, the root cause for the ACS suspend is still unknown. Further analysis and testing revolves around low-voltage power supplies as well as analog to digital converters. Analysis of ACS images taken before the suspend event shows no anomalies of any kind.

The further course of action will simultaneously prepare for further testing of the Side 1 electronics, which has been used since the installation of ACS, while preparing for a potential switch to the Side 2 electronics. The Side 1 tests will commence later this week, after verification that the tests will not harm the instrument. These tests will check various registers and voltages to pin down the location of the cause for the suspend.

Preparations for a switch to Side 2 involve procedure verification, Flight Software changes, as well as the definition of calibration and verification programs to be executed before the full ACS science program could hopefully continue. A switch to Side 2 could come as early as the week of 26 June, if the tests successfully show that this would be beneficial.

For the time being, no ACS science observations will be carried out. Measures are being taken to advance non-ACS observations to fill the available time.

"SAA" is the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region of high radiation over the South Atlantic, appropriately enough. They've got to be careful whenever the Hubble flies over that spot, because the extra radiation can damage the electronics.

OK, so now having read this myself for the first time, I'm not as worried. They've got backup electronics ("Side 2"), and it's possible they could fix this by using them, instead. That wouldn't require a spacewalk from the still-non-flying shuttles to accomplish. Interestingly, though, if it did take a shuttle flight, the timing might be good. NASA administrator Michael Griffin has said (at the January American Astronomical Society meeting in D.C.) that if this next shuttle shake-down flight shows that they can fly, they will fly to the Hubble. Now, we'd already planned to use that Hubble Servicing Mission, if it happens, to install an ultraviolet spectrograph, the "Cosmic Origins Spectrograph," or COS, as well as do some routine maintenance and replace some gyros. But if they had to tighten up the screws in ACS, so to speak, they could work that in, too.

Anyway, there's a lot they can find out and often fix from the ground, so it's not time to panic yet. The engineers we've got are good at this sort of thing.

Cue the Imperial March from Star Wars!

I saw an ad for this on the same page as that Bill Gertz article, below. PBS is advertising a Frontline show called "The Dark Side," which is all about the Cheney-Rumsfeld Axis in the so-called "War on Terror." (My use of "axis," "so-called," and scare quotes intentionally sarcastic.) The ad has the picture of a frowning Cheney (you know he never smiles), with "The Dark Side" plastered over it. At first, I thought it was just a funny coincidence, that they wouldn't be that obvious or intentional. That this might really be an even-handed look at the need for covert operations (there's a quote from Cheney(?) about the need to use the shadows and the dark side in this war). But no. It's exactly what you think it is.

Check out the link and read their own summary. All of the quotations are anti-Cheney/Rumsfeld and are pro-Tenet. Richard Clarke is featured, among other gripers.

The astonishing thing to me is that PBS wouldn't be more sensitive of its leftist reputation--I'd honestly have thought they'd never let such a ridiculous stereotype of themselves make it through in the ad for this show. I mean, come on! At least try to hide your biases, or save this kind for the ads that play on the Daily Kos or some such site.

Unintentionally Funny

Homework assignment for Logic 101.

---

(1) Create a syllogism that concludes the following:

...most illegal immigrants obey the law...

(2) Is such a syllogism logically valid?

New technology to block CCD cameras

Georgia Tech has created a new technology that could be used to neutralize CCD cameras in sensitive areas, according to UPI. As I understand this, CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) chips (the light-detecting part of a digital camera) reflect the incoming light back towards the source, perhaps like the retinas of dogs and cats, which makes their eyes seem to glow at night when you shine a light on them. By constrast, normal film emulsion scatters the incoming light--no reflection back at the source.

This reflection is what the Georgia Tech technology identifies, and the equipment shines a bright beam of white light at the camera, overexposing the CCD. CCDs are limited in how much light they can detect in a given amount of time, and a source that is too bright will lead to bright streaks stretching from it across the field of view. We have to deal with this all the time in astronomical CCD cameras, which are intended to capture as much light as possible from faint sources. If you were to shine a flashlight down the barrel of a working observatory telescope, you'd "saturate" the CCD camera and render it useless as long as the light was turned on.

The article specifically mentions the potential to thwart spies from photographing sensitive areas with digital cameras, either still or video. I'm interested in whether this might lead to a movement back to film cameras in espionage. I'm just a little disappointed that digital technology has probably (not that I know first-hand) taken over espionage photography, eliminating the need for such exotic devices as pinhole cameras, 9mm film slitters, and daylight darkroom developing bags.

Back to the Minox C, men!

North Korea proposes, America disposes

With Pyongyang readying a new long-range missile for a test flight, I've been hearing some speculation that perhaps the US could try out our fledgeling missile defense system on a live target at last. I'd assumed such talk was only idle and uninformed, but here's an article by Bill Gertz, the Washington Times' ace reporter for missile technology stories. He has it from a "senior Bush administration official" that "an option being considered would be to shoot down the Taepodong missile with responding interceptors."

According to some other unnamed officials, "...the system was switched from test to operational mode within the past two weeks." We apparently have eleven long-range interceptor missiles, spread between two sites, one at Fort Greeley, Alaska, and the other at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Sounds to me like the North Koreans picked the ideal time to test out their new missile, from our point of view. By all means, let them test it. And we'll proceed with our own test...

How you can recognize an astronomer...

So yesterday, at about 10:30 AM or so, one of the undergraduate research students saunters into the astrophysics computer lab and announces, with some sense of pride and accomplishment, "Man, I love getting to work in the morning!"

Cartography and politics

So The Economist has printed a map renaming the Persian Gulf simply, "The Gulf," and Iran (Persia) is mad and has banned The Economist. A similar thing happened a while back, when a National Geographic atlas made an alternative name of "The Arabian Gulf," printed next to "The Persian Gulf," and they got banned, too. It's a tyrranical regime we're dealing with here, so I'm not shocked at the censorship. Such petty censorship in this case, too.

But I'm still rolling my eyes at The Economist and National Geographic. I've never heard anybody in the English-speaking world use a term other than "The Persian Gulf" to refer to the Persian Gulf. So why go around trying to rename it? Do the British call it something different? Presumably not, since we'd probably have heard of everybody else in Britain causing such obvious emotional angst to the Iranian tyrants. Are these two publications trying to bend to some other nation who uses a different term? Then why change it for an English-speaking audience? (Actually, the article doesn't say it was in English...do these companies publish in Persian, too? Maybe Arabic?)

I can get a little riled up over cartography sometimes, because the politicall-correct mindset seems to have infected map-makers lately. John Derbyshire at NRO has written on this before, of map-makers eliminating the anglicized names of foreign locales on English-language maps. How are we supposed to find the Gulf of Alexandretta, for instance, when the map only prints its Turkish-language name? It's maddening, especially because we have proper English names for these places in our language, but the maps increasingly revert to the foreign language, many times without even the addition of the English term. The whole "Torino Olympics" was an eye-roller of an example (in English, it's Turin, as in "Shroud of")...will Venezia and Fiorenze be next? And then Roma?

As soon as we're told to pronounce "Germany" as "Deutchland," you'll know it's all over!

English-insisting Philadelphia restauranteur to be sanctioned?

If you haven't heard already, there's a Philadelphia restaurant that's put up a sign telling customers to place their orders in English. Seems obvious enough, right? But these days, with a creeping multiculturalism that discourages expressions of the majority language or culture, somebody's bound to whine. That's just what's happened now:

The city's Commission on Human Relations yesterday filed a discrimination complaint against Geno's Steaks over signs that read: "This is AMERICA ... WHEN ORDERING SPEAK ENGLISH."

... the restaurant is in violation of two sections of the city's antidiscrimination laws: denying service to someone because of his or her national origin, and having printed material making certain groups of people feel their patronage is unwelcome.

Not that the restaurant has actually denied service to anybody, and not that one's unchangeable national origin is different from the practice of speaking a language (say, the language of the person you're trying to order from), but the commission feels like maybe somebody might be offended anyway. And that's why the restaurant must be sanctioned on trumped-up legal charges! And that last section of the law, about making certain groups feel unwelcome: could you possibly make the law more vague and open to abuse? What about the freedoms of speech and the press, to say nothing of the whole notion of the American system of government and liberty? If I owned a shop and put up a politically-oriented poster, would that make my political opponents feel unwelcome and therefore give them grounds to sue? If I put up a religious flyer, would atheists or people of a different faith be able to sue me?

What open invitation to tyrrany!

UPDATE: The ACLU has totally wimped out on this issue (same article as above). Shame on them. They'll defend any fringe revolutionary they can wrap their arms around, but they won't touch a case in which both common-sense and our rights would be on their side.

The Inquirer's comments from readers are interesting. One person has decided he's had enough of freedom and liberty:

A two-month jail sentence would put a stop to this kind of thing. That's what the Cuban revolution did when barbers refused to cut Black hair -- they arrested them and boarded up their shops, and they put it all on TV. Result: barbers started obyeing the law.

It's that simple.

There you go! Cite our friendly tyrranical Communist regime to the south as the font of wisdom and justice! Throw the counter-revolutionaries in jail! Once again, the fact that this man hasn't denied a sandwich to anybody doesn't matter...

Eric Muller on the Pope's Auschwitz comments

Unlike Eric Muller at "Is That Legal?", I don't have really strong opinions on the Pope's comments at Auschwitz either way. Some of what the Pope said could be disagreed with, but it does not seem like he was trying to minimize or negate what happened to the Jews there.

There are some curious details: Being a Methodist, I don't understand the statement that "as a Christian and a Jew, [nun Edith Stein] accepted death with her people and for them" [emphasis mine], which seems to invoke some Catholic formulation.

The comments section is pretty active. Most readers seem to disagree with Muller's criticism, at least in tone or details. Here's one that caught my eye:

Note too that the Pope said that the Holocaust was an attack on God. This, too, sounded like calculated language to me. It is designed to turn the traditional "Murderers of God" argument on its head, to say no, it isn't the Jews who should be blamed for killing God, it is the anti-Semites who should be treated as deicides.

Interesting point! I'd never heard the "murderers of God" charge against Jews until just recently (and even then, just from TV show plots), but that might be from my background (rural conservative Methodist Southerner), but to the extent some people believed or believe it, this would seem to be a good way of turning that around.

Hillary-for-President rally in Nashville

A Nashville (population ~500,000) rally to show support for Hillary Clinton in the South drew twenty people. Posted without comment.

(Link via Instapundit)

Astronaut Tom Jones on NASA's Moon Plans

Tom Jones, a former NASA astronaut, writes about NASA's moon mission plans on Popular Mechanics' website. I haven't read his article yet, but I'd take seriously whatever he says. I met him at a talk he gave to the Washington, D.C. Phi Beta Kappa Association a year or two ago. Good speaker, and he's both an astronaut and a planetary astronomer.

I see from the bottom of that page that he has posted other articles on PM's blog. I'll have to start checking that regularly.

I'll comment more on this, once I've read the story...

The "Tar baby": More false cries of "Racism!"

Once again showing the cultural ignorance of some media elites, Tony Snow has been criticized for saying he didn't want to "hug the tar baby" on a particular issue. Jeff Goldstein has a good take-down of this inanity. Did these people not read the tales of Uncle Remus?! The tar-baby has got to be one of the two most memorable stories out of Uncle Remus, for me, second only to the briar patch. If any of Snow's critics had read this, they would have recognized the apt reference and not confused it with any supposedly racial terms. For those from a different culture, let me summarize the story. Br'er Fox has decided to catch Br'er Rabbit, and so he makes a figure of a baby out of a ball of tar. Puts clothes and a hat on it, and sets it by the road. Br'er Rabbit comes along and says a friendly "Good morning!" to the tar-baby, but, of course, "he don't say nothin'." Br'er Rabbit tries again, with the same result, and eventually gets so mad at the tar-baby's refusal to be friendly with him that he punches him. Of course, his paw gets stuck in the tar, and in trying to get himself free, he gets his other paws stuck, so that he's completely trapped.

Snow said he wanted to avoid discussing a particularly sticky issue, so as not to "hug the tar-baby." Now, read Snow's transcript again and recognize how good an analogy that is.

What kind of idiots see this and think, not of Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox, but of a supposed racial slur. One I've certainly never heard of in my life. Goldstein rightly says that "intentionalism" is the only way to interpret what people say. Groan.

Will Iranian clothing law single out Christians, Jews, & Zoroastrians?

The story I linked to below, regarding an upcoming Iranian law on clothing, might not be true. Or rather, the claim of identifying colors for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians might not be true. Iran apparently is planning to require Moslems to wear a standard dress, though. Unlike other commentators, I don't regard that in itself as fascist, because I think there have been prohibitions on various kinds of clothing for religious reasons in otherwise free societies in the past. This sounds far mroe restrictive than those, however, so it will probably be a real annoyance to the Persians. Let's see how Jews and Christians are treated under this...

Outrageous rudeness and abuse of the law by a Baltimore policewoman

I thought this was ridiculous, just from the first paragraph quoted on the Best of the Web today, but the whole story makes me outright angry. How dare these Baltimore police officers mistreat somebody who simply wanted to ask them directions?! Yes, they ran a stop sign (apparently by accident, given the situation), but that's a simple traffic ticket, which the driver didn't argue with. But the snide response to a request for help! What a jerk that officer is. And then to arrest them when they pulled up to the curve (with hazard lights on) to try to phone for help. Was it a no-stopping zone? Well, that's another traffic ticket, and the article doesn't even say that. "Trespassing" on a public street? What nonsense.

Frederica Mathewes-Green on The DaVinci Code

She makes a good point, here--one which I've said to friends family and probably heard expressed by the same--that while there's all this excitement over Dan Brown's claim that Jesus was married, that's actually a really insignificant point to Christianity.

"The Bible, in fact, doesn’t say that Jesus never married, though if he had it probably would have popped up in the communal memory somewhere. If it turns out that that detail somehow slipped the first evangelists’ minds, it would make no difference to the Christian claims."

You wouldn't have known that if you listened to certain sources arguing over the book. In fact, before I read it myself, I had assumed that this was the only reason the book was controversial to Christians. I actually told a friend, in a "hey, take it easy," sort of voice, that it doesn't make any difference to our faith whether Jesus was married or not (although of course there's no good evidence for it), so why worry about the book?

I think that objection was really obscuring the important reasons the book is a problem. The problem comes from its claims that Christ was only human, there's a necessary male-female duality within the godhead (the pagan ashera of the Old Testament being examples), and that religious observance could involve ritual sex. Those are the problematic conclusions, but there are also many false supporting claims within the text that need to be refuted, too.

Anyway, I'm glad to see Mrs. Mathewes-Green bringing this out.

Wow--score one for the Archbishop!

This may be the first time that I've said an "amen" to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I normally regard him as a wobbly on religion, but he's certainly standing up for the faith here: "Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, used his Easter sermon to criticize Mr. Brown's book [the DaVinci Code] for making the true story of Christianity seem 'automatically suspect.'"

This ought not to be newsworthy, of course...

The return of Jewish clothing insignia

And not just for Jews, but for Christians and Zoroastrians, as well. Iran's parliament, the "Islamic Majlis," has passed a law requiring non-Moslems to wear distinctively-colored ribbons. Yellow for Jews (sound familiar?), red for Christians, and blue for Zoroastrians. "It would make religious minorities immediately identifiable and allow Muslims to avoid contact with non-Muslims," according to the article.

I wonder if this will finally push our erstwhile European allies to get tough with the Iranian government. What'll the next step be out of Iran?

Ray Bradbury's wonderful Ode to Immigrants...and America

This is a wonderful poem! I didn't realize that Bradbury was a poet at all, let alone a good one.

I'll quote the first and last stanzas:

We are the dream that other people dream.
The land where other people land
When late at night
They think on flight
And, flying, here arrive
Where we fools dumbly thrive ourselves.
.
.
.
Run warm those souls: America is bad?
Sit down, stare in their faces, see!
You be the hoped-for thing a hopeless world would be.
In tides of immigrants that this year flow
You still remain the beckoning hearth they'd know.
In midnight beds with blueprint, plan and scheme
You are the dream that other people dream.

Read the whole thing for yourself.

Tony Snow as White House press secretary

I haven't gotten to see all of Tony Snow's first full press conference, but from the clips on the web, it looks like he did a good job. The reviews are in, and the critics agree. Odd to have TV reviewers and the like getting into this, but hey--it's on TV.

I'm a long-time fan of Snow, from 'way back in the '90s when he occasionally substituted for Rush Limbaugh, up through his days hosting Fox News Sunday, and then FNC's Weekend Live and his radio show. That's over a decade, I reckon. And as Rush has put it well, radio is a very intimate medium. You can get the impression the host is having a conversation with you (admittedly rather one-sided, unless you yell at the radio...not that I do...). Of course, he's been on TV more than radio in recent years, but he's got that easy-going manner that still gives off a friendliness to the viewer.

And so it's been an odd feeling to see him up there in front of the assembled White House reporters, speaking to a crowd. It feels like this is someone I've known personally who has gotten to be the president's spokesman--it's exciting. Weird, too, because I have to remind myself I have not met him. But I'm enjoying watching him, and I think he did a good job yesterday. I look forward to the rest of his tenure there and wish him the best.

Atheist argues against religious toleration

A certain Sam Harris has a book out called "The End of Faith," whose topic is pretty self-evident from the title. In this excerpt, reprinted at Beliefnet, he argues against religious toleration. All religions ought to be smashed alike, rather than respected.

Now, I've complained before about the misunderstanding of the word "tolerance." At least in a legal sense, it started out as the government not compelling people to believe a certain way, even if you might publicly criticize what it is that they believe. These days, it seems to have morphed (an example of "semantic drift"?) into an idea that you shouldn't even criticize other beliefs. This misunderstanding has led to all kinds of logical nonsense, such as that too-cute phrase, "Intolerance will not be tolerated!", which seems like a truly profound statement, until you think about it and realize it really is self-contradictory.

I don't argue for going around criticizing others' beliefs, by the way. That can be quite rude, unless it's in an appropriate context--a political debate, letters to the editor, blogs, etc. You don't walk up to people, or start conversations with colleagues, lambasting their beliefs.

But when the topic comes up, there is no need to say that all beliefs are equally true. Many are contradictory, and those cannot all be true simultaneously. You can believe what you wish and have the right to do so, without being compelled to agree with anybody else. That is tolerance. Harris is against any kind of such restraint, from what I get out of this (admittedly, I haven't read the whole thing).

But let me get to the criticism I was about to start on. Harris has a crude understanding on the degrees of belief:

People of faith fall on a continuum: some draw solace and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition, and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. However, religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.

Get that? If you are religious at all, you're either an "extremist" or a "moderate." Moderates advocate respecting the "unjustified beliefs of others" and are "fully committed to tolerance and diversity." Extremists "would burn the earth to cinders if it would put an end to heresy." What a load of crap.

I am neither. I am a committed Christian and while I would never compel other men to believe as I do, I certainly advocate missionary work to change their minds. I am not committed to "diversity." I think it would be great if everybody agreed with me on matters of religion (although as a Methodist, I'm not too concerned with specific details that faith and salvation don't depend on). But I wouldn't force my beliefs on anyone.

So Harris starts off with a fallacious premise. Not a surprise.

The supposed "Ugly American" phenomenon

I'd heard of this pamphlet before, but it's starting to inspire some pretty good discussions now. Jim Geraghty over at National Review's Kerry Spot (Will that need a name change now? But then, I thought "20th Century Fox" might update to "21st Century Fox" back in 2001, and they didn't. No need, really. And Kerry is one of those gifts that keeps on...well, you know.) has a couple of good posts on it. Click here and scroll down for more.

I certainly agree with the ideas of being polite and respectful of the local culture. But I would not say that this is a particular failing of Americans. As several correspondents of Geraghty have pointed out, this is often a virtue of traveling Americans, especially in comparison to tourists of other countries. As far as dress, I do dislike the apparent tourist dress code of T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes, unless you're out hiking in hot weather or are on the beach. (Of course, those clothes are *really* comfortable in hot weather, and I'll wear them myself. I did it all the time when I was younger.) When touring around the ruins of Mayan cities or visiting cathedrals in Europe, though, I'd prefer to see people a little more conventionally dressed. But again, dressing-down isn't a particular thing with Americans. When my cousin spent a semester studying in Spain, she made a comment that you could really pick out American tourists--they were the ones wearing khaki slacks and denim shirts. "Really? What do the Spaniards wear?", I asked. "T-shirts and too-tight jeans."

So, at least in some situations, it's the Americans who are dressing more nicely even than the local population. Incidentally, I especially like the khaki-and-denim look, myself. It's both nice-looking and comfortable.

I won't comment too much right now on the document itself, aside from pointing out that its title, "World Citizen Guide," is mired in that cosmopolitan mindset I detest. Let me reprint here the bigger points made in it, according to this Reuters story:

*** Think as big as you like but talk and act smaller. In many countries, any form of boasting is considered rude. Talking about wealth, power or status -- corporate or personal -- can create resentment.

*** Speak lower and slower. In conversation, match your voice level and tonality to the environment and other people. A loud voice is often perceived as bragging. A fast talker can be seen as aggressive and threatening

*** Dress up. You can always dress down. In some countries, casual dress is a sign of disrespect. Check out what is expected and when in doubt, err on the side of the more formal and less casual attire. You can remove a jacket and tie if you are overdressed. But you can't make up for being too casual.

***Listen at least as much as you talk. By all means, talk about America and your life in the country. But also ask people you're visiting about themselves and their way of life. Listen, and show your interest in how they compare their experiences to yours.

"Speak lower and slower," followed by, "match your voice level and tonality to the environment and other people." You know, those two commands are often contradictory. Have you ever been among a bunch of Italians? Canadians? Australians? Have you ever been in a group of mixed nationalities when the subject of soccer came up? Lower and slower gets ignored in those situations.

From an American's perspective, I'd like to issue a polite request to foreigners visiting our country or working here, in the same spirit of the above. Some of these can also be applied to Yankees visiting (or moving to) the South.

(1) Please stop running your mouth on about how you think we're doing everything in our society wrong. Complain about us all you want to when you're by yourselves, but it is quite rude to go into somebody else's country and start poking your nose into their business. Would you visit someone's house and spend the night criticizing his family? It's like that.

(2) No, we Americans don't drink as much (beer, wine, distilled perfume...) as y'all do. Please don't complain when we don't feel the absolute need to get drunk whenever we're all eating out. And no, Taco Bell does not serve vodka at the drive-through. Or inside. I swear, a foreign classmate of mine in college was mystified when he discovered this fact. And when you do wind up being the one person from the lab who's drunk at the end of the night, please keep in mind Point (1), above.

(3) And lower your voice when you do. Really. People over at the other side of the dining room are starting to stare, now.

(4) No, we don't follow soccer. And there's no objective reason we need to. You like it; that's great for you. We have our own sports. Honestly--do Americans visiting Europe feel the need to go on like this about baseball, basketball, or football?

(5) Yes, we have local news on our TV. Lots of it. Far more than we cover the goings-on in Lower Slobovia. This doesn't mean we're ignorant. Things happening right around you are much more your business than what they're doing over there is, and so we pay more attention to it. Plus, I thought you wanted us to stay out of other countries' businesses, anyway.

(6) Listen as much as you talk. Wait--wasn't this one on the Ugly American list? Well, it applies to some foreign visitors. I've listened to you going on and on about how much you dislike everything about us and how we need to do it like you do it. How often have you actually asked my opinions about anything?

(7) Stop making fun of our religiousness. Sure, your countrymen have fallen into the atheist sinkhole since World War II, but that doesn't make you sophisticated or intelligent. It's part of a slow decay that we can only hope y'all will crawl out of before this generation is out. Do you actually think that you are showing any sophistication when you sneer so? Actually, maybe that is a trait of sophisticates. But it's not a good trait. It's supremely arrogant, condescending, and rude.

Furthermore, our religiousness is not a vice. It is a great virtue, and it is something which will carry this country through whatever will befall her.

As my wife said to a German friend recently, who was bragging(?) that only half of his country was religious, "Yes, half of your country is religious: they're the Turks, Arabs..." Good point, honey.

(8) To sum up: be polite, and mind your own business. Think of visiting another country (like mine...like anybody's) as being a guest in someone else's home. His country is like his family. Keep your criticisms to yourself, unless you're asked for them.

The right way to respond to the Da Vinci Code

Illustrated by the Greek Orthodox Church. Summary: don't go threatening to sue Dan Brown; don't prohibit parishoners from seeing or reading it; rather, pass out flyers in church that explain that it's fiction and pretty obviously false as far as history and theology. I even like how they conclude--saying that church members who go see it for themselves will realize how silly its claims are.

Dumber still...

They were even trying to get the mailing address of the city changed?!!? "The article quotes the resort’s trademark lawyer from Washington, D.C, Stephen Trattner, as saying of Pinehurst, 'It’s a resort, not a town.'"

What unadulterated arrogance! D--- Yankees.

More on Pinehurst

As a follow-up from that previous post on trademark cases, here's an old (1999?) article on the fight between Pinehurst, North Carolina, and the golf course there. I don't know what has happened more recently, and maybe the golf course has won, but I agree that it's a bad idea to let anybody trademark a geographical name. I hope it's not possible, and if it were, it's idiotic. Just as bad is the apparent reliance on common-law-like effects: it seems that if the public generally associates a phrase with a given business, they've got a better case for trademark protection. But if the town had the name first, what does it matter what other people think of when they hear the name? This aspect of trademark law seems to run roughshod over individual rights.

Digging for the real news

OK, last month, CNN's prime-time audience fell by 38%. Fox News' fell by 17%. MSNBC's rose by 16%. So what's the story to follow here? According to the L.A. Times, it's that Fox fell by 17%.

Let's see; if I were a reporter, I think I might write a story about how MSNBC is doing so well and avoiding the problems hitting the other two cable networks. Or if I were in a mood for blood, I'd write about how CNN's ratings were double-plus-bad over the past month. But who seriously looks at the numbers and decides to slam the guy in the middle?

The LA Times' Scott Collins needs to take some rudimentary lessons from reporter school and figure out what the subject of a story should be. If he were covering a plane crash in which a third of the passengers died, a third came out with broken arms, and a third said they'd "never felt better," he'd write a long article on those broken arms. Weird.

Smiley-face trademarking

This is why I hate trademark law. Patents? Great. Copyright? Absolutely. Trademarks? Ugh!

Pinehurst, North Carolina, has had trouble with the Pinehurst golf club there, which somehow trademarked the name "Pinehurst" and wanted to stop anybody else from using it ("Pinehurst Barber Shop"? The trademark-stealing crooks!). Donald Trump tried to trademark "you're fired." Etc.

I have a problem with claiming exclusive rights to anything you didn't create. Trump wasn't the first guy to tell somebody "you're fired," and Pinehurst, N. C., has been called that since before the golf course was built. Yes, the "village" was planned and developed by the same guy who built the golf course, but it's stupid to go name a town and then try to tell people they can't use the name of the town to describe their other businesses!

In Wal-Mart's defense, they've said they were only trying to trademark the smiley-face because the Frenchman who claims to have created it (there are earlier American claimants, but they haven't tried to trademark it) was saying he was now going to trademark it in the US. Still...

Lileks translates Ahmadenijad's letter to Bush

This is hilarious.

US tattling on the Minutemen to Mexico?

It seems the US government has been sending Mexico information about where the Minutemen and other citizen border patrols have been working. Andrew McCarthy in National Review has a detailed article and commentary on this today. My goodness, this is stupid! First, there were the reports that border patrol agents had been occasionally told not to arrest illegal aliens caught by the Minutemen, and later, that they'd been told not to let the number of arrests go up after the Minutemen left. Now, they're actually telling Mexico where the civilian patrols are!

Maybe--maybe--there are good reasons for this, but the consular notification treaty they're using as an excuse doesn't require it, and we're left with the strong impression that higher-ups in border patrol don't actually want the agency to do its job.

Outrageous.

*Another* "Da Vinci Code" suit?!

Ugh. This is unbelievably wrong-headed. A Roman Catholic cardinal (Francis Arizne, who was considered a contender for pope last year) has suggested Christians sue Dan Brown over the depiction of Christ and Christianity in The Da Vinci Code. Great--go ahead and turn us into some twisted combination of Scientologists and radical Moslems!

I read the book, and while the claims in it really annoyed me (I wrote a long page of notes on where Brown got his facts wrong) (although I thought it was a pretty exciting book to read, nonetheless), Brown's got every right to write what he has. He can write things as wrong as he wants. He can make fun of Christianity ("make fun" isn't quite the right phrase--it seems more like he's got a real chip on his shoulder about the religion) all day long.

The response should be exactly what we Christians have been doing for the last few years--writing books and holding lectures showing where Brown went wrong. It's wrong to use the law to try to silence critics--honest critics or dishonest ones. Now, Cardinal Arizne isn't an American, and maybe he doesn't have an appreciation for the freedom of the press. But in our political philosophy in this country, we believe that our fundamental rights aren't creations of the government, to be given or taken away by it, but are natural rights that a government has the obligation to protect. This freedom of the press isn't just something for us Americans, but it is a right of all men, whether it's protected elsewhere or not.

I've never gone for boycotts, either, even for causes I believed in. I don't like the bullying. Let's stick to writing and talking to get our objections across and leave the law out of this. Leave lawsuits to the cults.

Papal convention

Interesting little protocol detail I'd never heard before. Not that I care that Mrs. Blair didn't observe it.

More on churches

As an addendum to my previous post/screed on trying to find a decent church in this area, I'll note that maybe this silliness in church services here is a desperate attempt to attract members in a region that's leaking its population. Maybe pastors and the congregations are convinced that people will only come to church if it's a "contemporary service" and there's all kinds of awful modern music and clapping and silly football cheers and high technology. Well, if so, it's not working, and it's turning off not only me, but others who grew up in the traditional Methodist church.

And I have a great counter-example. In addition to my church at home, I'm a member of Lovely Lane Methodist in Baltimore. It was the first Methodist church in this country, the "Mother Church of American Methodism," and the place where the famous Christmas Conference was held in 1784 to organize the newly-established denomination. Well, today a bad part of town has spread across the neighborhood surrounding Lovely Lane. The church can hold hundreds of people, but when so many people moved away to escape the crime and decay of inner-city Baltimore, the congregation dwindled drastically. By the time I got there, there were maybe 40 people on a given Sunday. I was one of maybe two or three people under the age of fifty, and there were no small children. The Methodist Church rotates preachers fairly often, and when the new preacher got there, she encouraged a lot of work on reaching out to find new members. It is working. The congregation isn't huge today, but it's bigger, and there are several families with children now, so we have a regular Sunday school for the kids.

We had long had too few people to form a choir, so we relied on voice students from the Peabody Conservatory. As a result, we got beautiful, classical solos and anthems. The organist is from Oxford (you can tell he's Episcopalian--he plays the music a tad too slowly for us Methodists--but he's good). The service and music are completely traditional. Nobody applauds the anthems and solos, and the hymns (hymns!) are sung from the hymnal, loudly and enthusiastically. It has gotten, in fact, a bit more high-church during this expansion, adding Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday services and such, which were unknown to me growing up in the country. I don't need a high-church service, actually, but such things do interest me. And we've gotten people coming to them. Nobody needed to have things dumbed-down for him to get him into the sanctuary!

Attitudes are different in different parts of the country, admittedly, and up here in Yankeeland, a student told me I'd have to look far and wide to find a church not using these stupid Powerpoint presentations. But I'm not convinced these new trends will help attendance at churches where the population is dwindling, and they might be hurting.

Robert Novak on Romney and "unconstitutional" religious tests

Robert Novak has an article on Mitt Romney's chances for the Presidency and the issue of his Mormonism. Novak is worried that a lot of people would vote against Romney because of his religion. That will certainly be an issue, I'd agree. Although I disagree with Mormonism's theology, I admire the character of so many of its adherents. It seems to build men of solid morals. The theology will still make some people on the Right uncomfortable, of course, just as Mormons' moral stands will put off some on the Left.

But Novak is wrong to call a man's voting decision "unconstitutional," if he bases it on religion. Yes, the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office. But that's a prohibition on making it a legal requirement. We're a democracy, and each citizen can vote his conscience, no matter what he bases the decision on. If one wants to vote against somebody solely on the basis of religion, he has that right. Novak knows better, and he makes a logically sloppy argument.

But I'd still advise people to consider Romney's politics first. It's not bad to consider someone's religious beliefs in deciding your vote. Hopefully, a candidate's religion will affect how he lives his life, and will inform some ideas on his political philosophy. But I doubt that the details of Mormon theology (especially its differences with standard Christian theology or Judaism) are going to put his politics outside the mainstream of the rest of us.

But back on the first hand, again: I can, by the way, think of an example of Mormon theology affecting a politician's political stances. Orrin Hatch's ideas on embryonic stem-cell research are different from most of ours on the Right, and I have read that it's because Mormonism has different ideas about the beginning of life from what we in standard Christianity assume.

Finding a good church

I've spent a good amount of time looking for a good church in this place where I'm temporarily exiled. Not in the sense of a denomination, but in the sense of a congregation. This place has been going through a long-term economic and (I think) population decline, and it shows. There are lots of abandoned buildings in town, and though the city still has a much larger population than my county seat back home, this city is limited in the kind of businesses it hosts, while my county seat is bursting at the seams and has all the kinds of stores I could need. Even though it's a small town.

Similarly, the churches around here are feeling the crunch. There are lots of church buildings, but not all of them are occupied. Those that are are pretty sparsely attended and are feeling the pressure to merge with similar congregations. Several have merged, in fact. I went to one Methodist church when I first got here that was the recent sum of three congregations. Beautiful old building. And then when the service started, they fired up a digital projector and ran Powerpoint throughout the entire service! It was so absolutely cheesy, you can hardly imagine. Little animated text running around to summarize the sermon points. The hymn lyrics splashed up on the screen. Don't we have hymnals? Although the rest of the qualities of this church seemed OK, I was too turned off by the concept of a projector to consider coming back. It was simply ridiculous.

As a follow-up note to this, that church (which didn't come close to filling the pews it had then) has now demolished the century-old, beautiful gothic brick building it had inhabited. A parking lot (I kid you not) will be put on the site, while they have built the new church across the street. It is a block-long, modernistic, steel-frame warehouse monstrosity. The narthex alone is the size of the church across the street from me. And if the congregation is still the size I witnessed, they don't occupy but a tiny fraction of the pews available. Who comes up with these brilliant ideas?!

Oh, and they applauded after the choir anthems. I hate that. People, you are not an audience at a concert. This is not a "performance," for you to applaud the performers. It is an act of worship, and you are a participant. This ugly trend came to my church at home, back around 1990, give or take. As a little kid, well before then, my parents had taught us that were, in fact, specifically not supposed to clap in church. For the theologically-thought-out reasons I mentioned above. So I was brought up in the tradition of the church. We used to have a Christmas Eve service in which members of the congregation who sang or played an instrument would do solos. Really beautiful music, nicely done. And still no clapping.
Then when I was in high school, I and some friends my age started getting asked to do solos, too. Great! And about that time, a handful of people in the congregation started clapping after we'd done our solos. I was actually insulted. I felt like it was a condescending compliment: "Aww, wook at de widdle kiddies! Dey can actually pway music wike de big people! Idn't dat cute?" Sheesh! I wanted to be taken as just a normal part of the service, like any other soloist. I thought about talking to the others my age and seeing if we could get a notice in the bulletin that we'd ask not to be applauded, but I never went through with it. The trouble with clapping, too, is that one person can infect the whole congregation. One clapper can be heard across the sanctuary, and you know how people will clap out of politeness if it sounds like everybody else is, even if they wouldn't start it themselves. Soon after that year, you started getting applause at all of the solos, all of the anthems, all of the special music... Thank goodness they haven't started applauding the hymns! Who knows, maybe they will start applauding themselves eventually.

After that church, I tried the little Methodist church across the street from me. Not bad, just a little small for me, and there was no choir. And it was odd to find a full-immersion baptismal pool (painted blue) up behind the altar. Full-immersion is fine with me, but the pool just stood out a bit much, and the place seemed a little sleepy.

So I tried a third church, in the next town over. This was the product of another recent merger of two Methodist churches, but the pews were well filled here. A good choir. The building was traditionally designed, and there were no projectors in sight. Only drawback was the music. They had hymnals but never (And I mean that literally. Never.) used them, instead bothering to print the lyrics to every hymn used that Sunday in the bulletin. Without the music. Ugh. That wouldn't be so much of a problem (rather than just an annoyance), except that these weren't regular hymns. I'd never heard these "songs" before and didn't know the music. How does anybody know how to sing it, if there's no music printed? Maybe all of them had heard them before, but I started going back regularly and don't think they were repeated each Sunday.

My biggest complaint, though, was that most of the music just wasn't traditional Methodist music. It was this new wave of "praise songs," I think. These can best be defined as tuneless, meaningless ditties that repeat the same four words over and over, endlessly. They strike me as having fake emotion. They try to stir up some emotion in you, but it's so obvious and sappy that they utterly fail, in me. I can tear up, singing "Amazing Grace," which has straight lyrics. But these? They just annoyed me. Jesus already knows his name is Jesus. And our repeating it a half-dozen times in a row drives home a pointless point that was already known to me before I could read.

And this was another church where everybody applauded the music. Ugh.

Still, I had spent so many weeks trying to find a decent church that I just gave up at this point and decided to stick with this one. Then this church built a new building. There was some small leak in the roof of the old one--not exactly a big reason to move, but half of the congregation had been in the next town over and wanted to get back there. OK, fine. And then I found out that the oversized, shallow-roofed warehouse I'd seen being built by the highway was no warehouse at all, but our new church. Grumble. Fine. Inside, it looked OK, though, until I discovered that they'd decided to have a digital projector system built in! Well, they didn't use it during the sermon, at least, unlike that one place. It was just used to flash up the lyrics to the "hymns." Which were also printed in the bulletin.

They also used this opportunity to rid themselves of those stuffy old Methodist hymnals. No need for those silly things: we've got Powerpoint! There are no hymnals anywhere in the sanctuary. At least where the congregation sits. I don't know if the choir has smuggled some of the contraband up there in the choir loft, but I couldn't find any. Still, I'd gotten to know the people there for a while and didn't feel like leaving, just over that. So I white-knuckled it through the meaningless, tuneless ditties (I can hardly dignify them with the word "songs," much less "hymns.") and simply refused to sing them or look at the Powerpoint, and enjoyed the Sunday school lesson afterwards and generally stuck it out.

Until the clowns showed up. A few weeks ago, right before the sermon, they had...clowns... And mimes. Actually, they were clown-mimes. They did some pantomime in clown costumes for what felt like five minutes or more, to an instrumental version of (get this) "Send In the Clowns"! That was the last straw, and my last Sunday there.

Since then, I've found a better Methodist church within walking distance. Tiny, but pretty nice. Beautiful building. Refused to merge, so they're pretty small, with an elderly membership. No choir. Not much clapping, which is a relief. They use the hymnals, but I've begun to notice that it's not that often, really. Most of the music is printed in the bulletin, and it's again these tuneless, meaningless ditties that nobody knows the music to. And almost nobody can be heard singing them! (A direct result of our ignorance of them?) I was ambivalent at that point, but then on Easter was another one of these "last straw" moments. We got to church a little late and missed the first part of the service. Looking at the bulletin, I found, near the lyrics of the unknown ditties we'd missed, that there had first been a football-game-style cheer: "J-E-S-U-S...Jesus!"

Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!!!

That's almost as bad as the clowns, although it was over more quickly. I think that's my last straw for this one, too. Now what?! I think I've exhausted the churches in town, so maybe it's time to look farther afield. Thank goodness I'm a Methodist, and we're a large denomination. I have friends here who are Presbyterian (PCA), and they have to go to the next state just to find the nearest church of their denomination. If it were a congregation they didn't like, I don't know where they'd have to go to find another!

I'm baaaa-ack!

Sorry for the long absence. Been away from blogging for the last month because of all kinds of family activity to plan and execute. Now that we've gotten to enjoy that, I'm back to work and back to blogging. Stay tuned...

Bernard Lewis on Anti-semitism

An excellent article here.

House of Lords for sale?

Via Andrew Stuttaford on NRO's The Corner, here's a report from the London Times about a scandal erupting over the new method of naming peers to the House of Lords. Recall that the Labour party eliminated the hereditary lords from sitting in the body, in favor of non-hereditary lords named by the party in control of the House of Commons. Not exactly a check on the tyranny of the majority, is it? And, surprise, surprise: now it seems that one of those nominees made a million-pound loan to the Labour party.

Although I wouldn't want to live under a system of monarchy and nobility as England has and had, I can see that the hereditary lords at least were independent of the House of Commons and could act as a check on majoritarian power. (And, coming from one who doesn't have to live there, I can also see a romantic, historical attraction to the old system.) The new system abolishes some legal priviliges of lords, but it doesn't improve the government. Rather, it makes it worse.

England needs an elected Senate.

Good for him

A man in Puerto Rico for the World Baseball Classic held up a sign reading, "Abajo Fidel," or "Down with Fidel [Castro]," from the stands Friday. The top Cuban "official" (whatever that means, in this case) at the games came rushing over to confront the man, but Puerto Rican police, thankfully, came to the spectator's aid and took the Cuban off and explained to him the concept of free speech. Good for this man, and good for the Puerto Rican police!

Cuban TV was carrying a live feed from the games, so Cuban subjects watching would have been able to see the sign, briefly. Ahh, yes, we can't have the chance that the proles would be able to catch a glimpse of somebody in another country criticizing the great leader, now, can we?

Shelved Pentagon space plane

(via Drudge) Aviation Week & Space Technology is reporting that the Pentagon has shelved a space plane that has been operational since the 1990s. It is a two-stage to orbit system that could be outfitted with a number of different payloads, including satellites and anti-missile (or anti-satellite, I imagine) kill vehicles.

If they've cancelled the program, it suggests that it was either not successful (although this program was reportedly "operational"), was hit by changes in the budget, or was surpassed by something better. I'm hoping for the latter!

A leftist speaks honestly

I was listening to the BBC World Service on the way to church this morning, and they were discussing the situation in Iraq.
There was a caller whose nationality I didn't get, but who spoke with a pronounced accent, who said straight out that he hoped Iraq failed. He wanted the country to fail, so that it would be a defeat for Bush. A defeat that would prevent Bush from invading Syria or Iran.

I cannot call this man a "liberal," because despite the modern usage to mean "left-wing," I still like to pretend sometimes that it has a little of its old meaning left--a lover of freedom. This man is no lover of freedom. He wants the fledgeling democracy there to die. What a wish to extend to Iraq's 20 million citizens.

NASA programs squeezed in budget

The New York Times reports that some research programs are getting squeezed in NASA's budget, as the agency organizes around the manned space program goals of returning to the Moon and going on to Mars. I'm sympathetic to both sides, actually. Some of my fellow astrophysicists moan about their fields getting tight, but a lot of this is a matter of whose ox is getting gored. NASA isn't being slashed; rather, it's bringing in a big, new manned program, and the others are being shuffled around to make room for it.

I've never understood the attitude expressed by some astrophysicists like James Van Allen (discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth) that manned spaceflight is pointless, and we should concentrate only on robotic space probes (and telescopes, I imagine). I've heard similar thoughts expressed by some friends of mine over the years. Never that many people, mind you, but enought that I get the impression it's a more widely shared sentiment than I hear expressed. Generally, though, especially among us youngsters, there's an enthusiasm for manned space flight (I never say that horrible, clunky, and Politically Correct phrase, "human space flight," which NASA has imposed upon itself.). The shuttle program was lately a ho-hum affair, as it seemed our manned program was stalled in Near Earth Orbit. But the goal of reaching to the Moon and planets is an exciting one for lots of us.

Still, I'm a scientist and want NASA to keep the science programs up, too. I think the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope ought to be the primary science priorities, so of course we have to make some compromises elsewhere. I just hope they're not too big or irreversible.

Astronomical telescopes obsolete in a half-century?

Well, the BBC starts off saying that, but then you scroll down and find that it's the claim of one scientist who's relying on if trends continue on more than one count and some other speculation and assumptions on others. And he's countered by other scientists. What this fellow claims is that airplane contrails and global warming will make unmanageable amounts of cloud cover over astronomical observatories by 2050 that will prohibit any ground-based astronomy from then on.

Of course, he didn't take into account that for airplane contrails to disperse into broader clouds takes specific atmospheric conditions that aren't always there. And even if one of these clouds blows over your observatory from elsewhere (he says that sometimes contrails blow for "hundreds of kilometers"), a lot of our best observatories are on the Pacific coast--Hawaii, Chile, and California. The prevailing winds are from the West, there. Yes, you have planes crossing the Pacific, but you don't have too many destinations to the immediate West of these observatories.

Italian commission finds USSR behind pope's assassination attempt

This article from the AP brings the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II back into the news. After Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turk, shot the Pope and was caught, he initially said the Bulgarian spy agency and ultimately the Soviets were at the top of the operation. He changed his story a number of times, but there was other evidence to implicate at least Bulgaria in the crime. Now an Italian parliamentary commission, originally set up to investigate KGB penetration of Italy during the Cold War, has concluded that the Soviets were, in fact, behind the operation.

What's surprised me throughout the years is finding that there are liberals here in America who have dismissed the possibility out of hand. As if a tyrannical regime that killed a quarter of the Ukrainian population, rounded up and murdered entire "classes" of Russian peasants, sent political dissidents to the Gulag in vast numbers, and so on, would never, NEVER have considered offing a problematic pope!

Of course, there are liberals who still claim Alger Hiss was innocent, when the Venona transcripts prove his guilt...

The ice has cracked

The cold Canadian model of socialized medicine might be thawing. I don't know that we can cheer just yet, but there's hope, anyway. Their Supreme Court ruled against certain restrictions against private medical insurance recently, and now private medical clinics are opening up at the rate of about one each week!

It doesn't sound like much from our perspective, but keep in mind that Canada had an absolute ban on private medine until now. People were actually dying in waiting lists for medical attention. And that's what prompted the lawsuit that broke this.

I remember a Canadian colleague once telling me that their absolute form of socialized medicine was necessary. That it was right to prohibit anybody from spending their own hard-earned money to get medical attention. Why? Because it would result in the rich being able to do better than the rest!

Well, heck! What about food? Sure, we and Canada both have welfare systems that assist the extremely poor to buy food, but we don't prohibit the rich from buying their own, do we? And this results in a system in which the rich can afford more and better food than the poor. Isn't food more inherently necessary for life than medical attention? I mean, on an every-day basis. Does the Canadian Left have a problem with this, or will they propose socialized food as a remedy to the horrors of inequality at the supper table?

I can hardly imagine somebody coming up with this line of logic, and, despite him being a smart man (an astrophysicist), I suspect he simply repeated some slogans he heard somewhere without thinking.

The evolutionary emergence of blondes

This is interesting. I hadn't thought about it, but have you ever noticed that around the world, dark hair and eyes are predominant in people? That's not as true among Caucasians, where there's quite a variety in hair and eye color. The research apparently shows that this was an evolutionary adaptation from about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, near the beginning of civilization. In Northern Europe, near the retreating edges of the ice sheet, there were plenty of animals to eat, but not too many edible plants, unlike in regions farther south. So unlike other places, food-gathering was something more dangerous and performed mostly by men. Many were killed in the process, and you had a lot of women competing for the few survivors. Hair and eye color wound up being a genetic strategy to stand out and attract mates. It wasn't as necessary in other parts of the world, so the genes didn't wind up being as widespread.

Now I'm reminded of that line from Big Trouble in Little China, "Chinese girls do not come with green eyes."

I wonder, though, about the ancestors of the Eskimos and other far-northern tribes. Were they also up there at that time, and was their culture subject to the same effects? Eskimos today are dark-haired and brown-eyed. Just curious. Of course, you won't have the same random genetic quirks happening everywhere, so even two populations with the same environmental pressures might not have the same genetic mutations popping up.

Unexpectedly, the article ends by saying the WHO claims that the blonde-haired gene is dying out and should be completely extinct in 200 years. Right. No, I don't buy that. It's around for 11,000 years, and the instant our science matures to the point where we can study such things, we discover it's about to end Right! This! Minute! ?? This should violate some biological equivalent of the Cosmological Principle.