If I were more generous....

I might believe that the events of the past week have nothing to do with a PR campaign to establish the current administration's "tough on terrorism" bona fides. I might. Since I'm in a credulous mood today, even with the primaries roughly 9 months away, surely it's only a coincidence.

The trouble with the Internet

"South Park did a decent job encapsulating a skeptics view of the Joseph Smith story, but in the main I would take Tacitus over South Park for historical accuracy, and South Park over Tacitus for poop jokes.

It's funny if you read The Annals (heh heh) of Tacitus that he's largely objective about events and other cultures, and saves all his mouth foaming for Christians. I guess Paul must have been as popular in Rome as he was with the Jerusalem church."

This is a quote taken from a rather popular Internet forum that acts as a sendup of dozens of contemporary news items. The first paragraph may be taken as strict opinion, and not subject to any meaningful comment.
The second paragraph is more interesting. The first sentence presents an opinion of Tacitus, a complete unknown to more one half of one percent of persons currently alive. It then states that Tactus is somehow historically accurate about "events and other cultures," and only irrational about Christians.
Well, someone reading this might then go and read a translation of Tacitus, or read some hideous scholarly article about Tacitus, but by and large that sentence will sit in their memory like some tiny, poisonous toad, unquestioned. In fact, Tacitus was a historian in the sense that what he said was accepted up into modern times as "historical," but some of what he says is factual, and some is just risible. In between, we have such things as his commentary on the Germans, who Tacitus chose to present as a moral model to contrast with the Rome of his own time, which he despised for its decadence and corruption.
The Germans were described as strong, simple, sturdy folk with good bedrock moral values and great integrity…in fact, superior in just about every way Tacitus could think of, except, of course, that they were barbarians.
This presentation of the Germanic tribes was taken out of its Taciturn context and was a standard reading in classrooms throughout Germany well into modern times. German youth were presented with an opinion (what was, in fact, simply whole cloth from some Roman who had never been near Germany or the Germans, except perhaps some he had run into in Rome) as if it were demonstrable historical fact.
Generations of German youth were persuaded to accept Tacitus' account as the basis for the superiority of the Germans and German culture, which was part of the foundation on which the Hohenzollern Empire built its theory that Germany was entitled to its "place in the sun," and on which the Nazis built their theories of race and world conquest.
So much for objectivity.

Is American information dead?

President Obama held a "town hall meeting" yesterday. While not inquiring as to how many people find the name ludicrous, I would be interested to know the percentage of people who believe that any -any- such things are not as staged and scripted as a movie. Does anyone believe that some 30 year old law graduate seriously and earnestly asked the President "Is the American dream dead?"

This is all quite preposterous, but the most difficult thing for me to believe is that a graduate of Princeton and some equally prestigious sounding law school (Indiana, I believe) would be enough of a dupe to participate in such a charade. Since I can't believe someone of his putative intelligence would do such a thing, I can only assume that he was performing from a memorized script.

Watching these things is more a waste of time than staring at the wall; the latter is more likely to produce thought.

A Fable for our Time

I can't really call this fantasy, because it isn't. Except for the last part (which apparently DID happen).

An obscure fanatic from a small town makes wild assertions and threatens to burn books.

His rhetoric is taken up by the news media and given national and international coverage.

He is given lavish attention by important government officials and agencies, thereby raising him from obscurity to notoriety overnight.

Attention is so acute that incipient hysteria and paranoia spill over and result in the chief executive of a nation of millions of people making a personal appeal to this individual.

A member of a major news organization wonders whether or not the media handling of the whole affair "-might have been reckless."

D'ya think?

Bibliography: See Adolf Hitler, rise of National Socialism, Beer Cellar Putsch, Hitler treason trial, etc., etc. You may end with the burning of the Reichstag if you wish....

Notes on Tragedy

Contrary to the common use of the term in our degraded times, where every stubbed toe is a "tragedy," the essence of tragedy lies in its inevitability. It may be that the inherent tragedy in representative government is that the representatives must lie repeatedly to their constituencies, making promises they cannot keep in order to be elected and re-elected.

The real damage is that the false promises comprise a secular Slough of Despond, in which any common regard for society is lost.......

"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions."

- Thomas Jefferson

Define "Prescient"

Well, this is one definition, written in 1978. Nineteen seventy-eight:

Lipidleggin' by Paul F. Wilson

And here's another, probably better known:

Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

This is where we're going, but it's hard to say exactly why. Since we have a representative government, I am forced to assume that in some fashion we've actually chosen to live out this nightmare, but that doesn't mean I understand it.

Eradicating Meaning

When a "player," someone who represents an interest (aka a nation) gets the Nobel Peace Prize, it damages the whole notion of "peace." Peace cannot be partisan....and when we dig into the elements of most situations where leaders or representatives of states were awarded the NPP, the partisan element isn't hard to find.

Woodrow Wilson fundamentally didn't deserve the Nobel Prize, because no matter how noble his Fourteen Points, without the U.S. taking the lead and forgiving all the war loans to the European countries (which was done after WWII, a lesson hard learned), it ultimately validated the crushing reparations exacted against Germany in the Versailles Treaty, which was a major factor in bringing Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP to power in Germany. The U.S. may or may not have deserved the pejorative "Uncle Shylock," but Calvin Coolidge was simply being Bismarckian in his realpolitik when he said "They hired the money, didn't they?" These things may be judged one way or another by history, but they don't fit into consideration for a peace prize. They just don't.

Henry Kissinger, in the context of the Vietnam War, may have been deserving of many things, but the Nobel Peace Prize was certainly not one of them.

One of the very few things James Earl Carter may deserve to be remembered for is the Camp David Peace Accords. But should anyone have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for this? Peace in that situation would have involved the Palestinians, whether the Egyptians were present or not- and the Palestinians were nowhere to be found. This may have been the first "joke" NPP.

What Barack Obama has done -in any substantive way- to merit a nomination for such a prize -let alone its being awarded- is hard to fathom. The Nobel committee's most trenchant statement on the topic seems to boil down to "He's made people feel good."

At the very least, it is questionable that the leader of a nation with tens of thousands of its forces currently in combat roles on foreign soil would be considered for such an award, regardless of the situation. It is therefore impossible to believe that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize (along with the prize for Literature...any that aren't awarded for measurable scientific achievement) hasn't devolved into the same level as the political vagaries of the International Olympic Committee or the United Nations. The Nobel Peace Prize should be ignored.

Just do it. Now.

Seen on the news streamer this morning (does it really matter the channel?): "Government says recession will be over by the end of the year. Recovery to take longer."

So- if we translate from the WhiteHousese, this means "We can't wait three or four years for the economy to bounce back, so we're going to declare the recession over in our New Years' message, even though those millions will still be unemployed and the Dow remains hovering in the low 8K. It'll come back.....sometime. In the meantime, we can get down to the serious business of spending more and more obscene amounts of money in a recession-free atmosphere."

To those responsible: Go lick a dog's ass 'till it bleeds.

Now put some spin on that......

.....before breakfast.

While we are told by the media that the First Lady is busy "enchanting Europe," her husband is engaged in "town meetings," throwing out the same sort of content-free howlers that seem to be more and more common in this administration.

"....a world free of nuclear weapons."

"....The U.S. is changing, but Europe must change too."

"....reaching out to all Muslims who seek peace."

This of course is on what CBS calls his "world tour," which consists of the U.K., France, and Turkey. I've been to more European countries on what I call a "trip."

My best response to this was written by Lewis Carroll:

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

- the Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

Are Facts Overrated?

Studies have (again) found that there is no link between autism and the preservative Thimerosal, used in vaccines. But the same voices are raised, over and over again -with no basis for their claims- that somehow Thimerosal is the problem....as I commented on in an earlier post. A broader issue is the irrational spillover that starts to blame ALL vaccination for a whole array of conditions.
There is no doubt there are many terrible afflictions in this vale of tears, and people are going to clutch desperately to anything that appears to provide an answer. There are celebrities with loud voices who have taken up this baseless cause, and for that reason, as the noise bounces around on the rocks and appears credible because of its volume, a number of weak-minded politicians join this ill-considered crusade.
But at some point facts must be acknowledged....or we are just "the tribe that lost its head."

The Mortgage Debacle Summarized

After reading a few torturous explanations of "what really happened" with the collapse of the housing market and its extended debacle, I confess my attention wandered. Today I ran across this column by the author Orson Scott Card that puts it quite succinctly, and makes everything I've read and viewed fall into place: Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

res ipse loquitur, indeed.

Not September yet, nor is this Munich, but.....

This is the best thing I've read so far concerning the "border mistake" in the Caucasus. Love to watch the Russian Army steamrollering little Georgia, while the EU rationalizes. Neville Chamberlain, you should see us now; "peace in our time".... no doubt about it.

As the great Tom Lehrer sang, in the song of the same name (albeit in a different context), "Who's Next?"

A Question of Character

.....which is, we are assured by many moderns, irrelevant and part of the bad and flawed past. Nevertheless, it lies at the root of misunderstanding the actions of such nations as China and Russia. Yes, nations, like the individuals of which they are composed, have a character. That character doesn't change with the label of the decade, or of the century.

China's character is fundamentally ethnocentric; the name of the nation, which may be rendered phonetically "Chung-kuo" means "Middle Kingdom." This doesn't mean halfway, it means it's seen by its people as in the center, just as in the Ancient Middle East, e.g., when Herodotus reported that the Persians considered all other peoples civilized by their strict geographic proximity to Babylon. In the case of China, other nations are barbaric and fundamentally inferior, and fall away in that inferiority strictly by their closeness to the Han (Chinese). Such a philosophy is reinforced by the simplest of expedients. Let's consider the current Olympic Games. Any activity in which the Chinese do not medal is considered irrelevant, unworthy, or simply ignored. Anything in which they do medal is considered irrefutable proof of cultural and racial superiority. All such actions are characteristically Chinese, and are displayed and recorded in their culture for centuries, and have nothing to do with any labels like "Communist," "Democracy," or any of the rest of Western socio-political terminology.

Russia's character is fundamentally paranoid schizophrenic. All other nations are regarded as fundamentally untrustworthy, and having at best negative, and at worst sinister motives toward Russia. All Russian interaction with other nations may be understood in this light. Consider the current invasion of Georgia. Many journalists are currently using terms to describe the Russians lying about a cease-fire while continuing their military operations against Georgia such as "inconsistent." No, they're not being inconsistent. They they are lying to buy time, in a very calculating manner that is perfectly consistent with the way Russians have acted for centuries. Then those nations opposing them will be faced with the fait accompli of the Russians basically occupying and controlling Georgia, and completely unable to field any force of their own to oppose Russia. Thus Russia's policy of paranoid expediency will have been vindicated -again. A Russian would not be resentful if his country were described as having a "cynical foreign policy." He would only display bewilderment...."What other kind would we have?" People only become confused by thinking about any "new, improved, post-Soviet Russia." No: there is only Russia.

End of story.

I Just Need an Explanation, Please.

OK- the hurricane forecast for the 2007 season is out, from whatever wizard peers into his scrying mirror, doppler radar, or whatever substitute for tea leaves they use, and it looks like Doom For Sure. What I want to know is what this means. To me.

"He (N.E. Cromancer) says there's a 74% chance of a major hurricane making landfall on the US coast. He says there's a 49% chance of a major hurricane landfall on the Gulf Coast between the Florida Panhandle and Brownsville. The 20th century average was 30%."

We can dispose of #1 on the general assumption that since I don't live within 800 miles of a coast, we can call it a miss.

Does #2 mean "this year?" And, if so-

How does it relate to #3's stated average for the 20th Century (if I understand the concept of "average" aright, and I think I do)?

Am I correct in assuming that there can't be any real relation? Did the stoplight just change to green, and is that my favorite color? Did a few too many brain cells just go "poof?"