Get Hooked on Gas - GM Is Your Pusher

In today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman writes about GM and its latest atrocity.

Strong language? Maybe - but not undeserved.

Friedman is behind the Times Select wall, so for those of you who aren't subscribers, here's the main point:

Is there a company more dangerous to America's future than General Motors? Surely, the sooner this company gets taken over by Toyota, the better off our country will be.

Why? Like a crack dealer looking to keep his addicts on a tight leash, G.M. announced its "fuel price protection program" on May 23. If you live in Florida or California and buy certain G.M. vehicles by July 5, the company will guarantee you gasoline at a cap price of $1.99 a gallon for one year — with no limit on mileage. Guzzle away.

As The Associated Press explained the program, each month for one year, G.M. will give customers who buy these cars "a credit on a prepaid card based on their estimated fuel usage. Fuel usage will be calculated by the miles they drive, as recorded by OnStar, and the vehicle's fuel economy rating. G.M. will credit drivers the difference between the average price per gallon in their state and the $1.99 cap." Consumers won't get any credits if gas prices fall below $1.99.

"This program gives consumers an opportunity to experience the highly fuel-efficient vehicles G.M. has to offer in the mid-size segment," Dave Borchelt, G.M.'s Southeast general manager, said in the company's official statement. Oh, really?

Eligible vehicles in California include the 2006 and 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban (half-ton models only), Impala and Monte Carlo sedans, G.M.C. Yukon and Yukon XL S.U.V.'s (half-ton models only), Hummer H2 and H3 S.U.V.'s, the Cadillac SRX S.U.V., and the Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick Lucerne sedans. Eligible vehicles in Florida include the 2006 and 2007 Chevrolet Impala and Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick LaCrosse.

Let's see, the 6,400-pound Hummer H2 averages around nine miles per gallon. It really is great that G.M. is giving more Americans the opportunity to experience nine-miles-per-gallon driving. And the hulking Chevy Suburban gets around 15 miles per gallon. It will be wonderful if more Americans can experience that too — with G.M.-subsidized gas.

Our military is in a war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan with an enemy who is fueled by our gasoline purchases. So we are financing both sides in the war on terror. And what are we doing about that? Not only is GM subsidizing its gas-guzzlers, but not a single member of Congress, liberal or conservative, will stand up and demand what most of them know: that we must have some kind of gasoline tax to compel Americans to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles and to compel Detroit to make them.

And Friedman points out the most obscene part of all: GM is trying to hook soldiers on their product. "Just show your military ID!" and get a $500 discount on one of these things. A nice little vicious circle - squander the gas you're dying for.

Have they no shame?

And can anyone claim in the face of this and its almost countless analog decisions that corporations care about anything at all besides their own personal profits?

The gap between Says and Is

Over at Unclaimed Territory Glenn Greenwald takes a short but pithy look at the gap between our stated foreign policy objectives and what we actually do.

Last week, the Bush administration normalized diplomatic relations with Libya -- and is soon to remove them from the list of terrorist countries for the first time since 1979 -- despite the fact that that Libya's internal repression is among the worst in the world and it is about as far away from democratizing as a country can be. All of those pro-Libya actions are direct and glaring contradictions of our supposed foreign policy principle of only supporting countries which provide democracy and freedom to their citizens (although, purely coincidentally, Libya has developed superb relations with international oil companies).

In virtually every Middle Eastern country, we seem to be acting as contrary to our ostensible ideals as possible -- including our increased support for Gen. Musharraf in Pakistan despite his increasing stranglehold on that country's democratic processes, our strengthening alliances with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and our contempt for those governments which are democratically elected but not to our liking, including Hamas, Hugo Chavez, and even the government of Iran.

It's as though we think that Muslims -- whose improved view of the U.S. is allegedly the objective of all of our foriegn policy actions, including our occupation of Iraq -- won't notice the ever-widening gap between our pro-democracy rhetoric and our actions. Of course they notice.

As always, Glenn is thoughtful and rational - he finishes by acknowledging that

There are good, convincing, legitimate reasons why we should maintain alliances with undemocratic countries which nonetheless promote U.S. interests (including, for instance, a country's cooperation in tracking Al Qaeda activities, as Libya's intelligence service provides). Virtually every country makes its foreign policy decisions based on that self-interested calculus.

But - you knew there was a but, didn't you?

But we are a country which has now loudly proclaimed that everything we do -- including invading soveriegn countries -- is justified by our need to bring democracy to the world. Once a country makes that the proclaimed centerpiece of its foriegn policy, acting in direct contradiction to it achieves nothing other than the destruction of national credibility and the failure of every claimed foreign policy objective.

I don't have much to add - what is there to add? Read Glenn (you should anyway).

Happy Birthday, Walt!

Born this day in 1819, on Long Island ... Walt Whitman








FACING west from California's shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity,
        the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled;
For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere,
From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero,
From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands,
Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,
Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)

AIDS needs no Onlies

Dr Peter Piot, UNAIDS Executive Director, just said (on the BBC) something remarkably sane:

Anything with the word 'only' in it doesn't work for AIDS. Abstinence only, condoms only: we need a combination of steps.

Of course, he's been saying this for years. But some people (I'm talking to you, America!) don't listen.

Some do.

However, there has been some success. Six out of 11 African countries reported declines of at least 25% in HIV prevalence among 15-24-year-olds in capital cities.

Rates of sex among young people declined in nine of 14 sub-Saharan countries.

And condom use with a non-regular partner increased in eight of 11 countries in the same region.

It's a start. Maybe we can be reasonable now, too?

Without Due Process ... On One Man's Word

From Glen Greenwald over at Unclaimed Territory, a shock. I agree with Antonin Scalia about something.

Yeah. I know.

But this is a fundamental American right: the right of due process.

As James Madison wrote, "Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

And again, "It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle."

Glen says:

Here is what Antonin Scalia said in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in explaining why the Constitution bars the Government from imprisoning U.S. citizens without a trial:

The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive. . . .

The gist of the Due Process Clause, as understood at the founding and since, was to force the Government to follow those common-law procedures traditionally deemed necessary before depriving a person of life, liberty, or property.

When a citizen was deprived of liberty because of alleged criminal conduct, those procedures typically required committal by a magistrate followed by indictment and trial. See, e.g., 2 & 3 Phil. & M., c. 10 (1555); 3 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States §1783, p. 661 (1833) (hereinafter Story) (equating “due process of law” with “due presentment or indictment, and being brought in to answer thereto by due process of the common law”). The Due Process Clause “in effect affirms the right of trial according to the process and proceedings of the common law.” Ibid. See also T. Cooley, General Principles of Constitutional Law 224 (1880) (“When life and liberty are in question, there must in every instance be judicial proceedings; and that requirement implies an accusation, a hearing before an impartial tribunal, with proper jurisdiction, and a conviction and judgment before the punishment can be inflicted” (internal quotation marks omitted)).

As Scalia makes so clear -- but shouldn't need to -- if there is any defining American principle, it is that the President can't throw U.S. citizens in jail without charges and a trial. Since the 13th Century Magna Carta, not even the British King could do that. But there are virtually no American political principles left which are not being called into question, if not overtly attacked, by Bush followers. Prohibitions on torture, the right to a jury trial, the obligation of the President to obey the law, the right of the press to publish stories without criminal prosecution -- all of the values which have distinguished this country and defined who we are as a nation for the last two centuries are all being debated and assaulted.

What do you do with people who never learned that American citizens can't be imprisoned by Executive decree and without a trial, or that American journalists aren't imprisoned for stories they write about the Government's conduct? People like this plainly do not embrace, or comprehend, even the most basic principles of what America is.

Go read Glen's whole post: it's important and timely.

And I leave you with this final word from Madison: It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.

The Week in Entertainment

Film: caught The Fantastic Four on pay-per-view - not too bad, though I was right in my belief that what was acceptable in a 17-year-old Johnny Storm would be pure obnoxiousness in a grown(?) man

TV: House finale - yow! Interesting how much of a bastard he is even to himself, isn't it?

DVDs: Nanny McPhee; re-watched both X-Men movies in preparation for seeing X-3 tomorrow. Possibly a bad idea, but... any excuse to watch Hugh Jackman's Wolverine slaughter the bad guys and simultaneously scare and comfort the kids!

Read: Henning Mankell-fest - The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, Before the Frost - have now read all the Wallander novels translated into English

The Greenbelt represented graphically

This is cool ... saw it on Pharyngula and Living the Scientific Life both, and tried it for this page. It's especially cool watching it unfold.

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Get your webpage graphic representation here.

Horrible Edward Gorey Death

Another silly long weekend quiz...

What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?

You will be smothered under a rug. You're a little anti-social, and may want to start gaining new social skills by making prank phone calls.
Take this quiz!

Warrants: of selective value it appears

I'm so upset. I've written my senators to complain that they voted for this man. As Reuters said, accurately (unfortunately):

The U.S. Senate on Friday confirmed Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden as CIA director in a vote that gave a broad bipartisan endorsement to the architect of President George W. Bush's domestic spying program. [emphases mine]

Sure, there weren't the votes to defeat the nomination. But - but!!!! How on earth can we (Democrats) protest warrantless wiretapping and all that it implies and then hand the CIA over to the man who was the architect? How can we let this have "broad bipartisan support"???

At least nobody I've given money to this year voted for it. (Full list of how the votes break down here (by the way, why is there an astrological breakout? It doesn't seem to mean anything - look, there are three Leos, and they all voted differently! But I digress...))

Looks like this bumper sticker is more right than I thought when first I saw it... sigh

I just bet he would...

Spotted in the Globe and Mail (a Canadian paper) yesterday, in a story about the Bush-Blair dog-and-pony show in DC:

In a lighter moment, both leaders were asked what they would miss about each other once they are both out of office, with Mr. Blair widely expected to step down soon given widespread unhappiness with his government.

“Wait a minute,” quipped Mr. Bush. “I'll miss those red ties, that's what I'll miss.” He quickly added: “Don't count him out. ... I want him here so long as I'm the president.” Mr. Bush's term expires in January, 2009.

Don't you just know W is scared of Blair's being replaced by someone who reflects what the British people think?

Happy Birthday, Ralph! (Ralph Waldo?)

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, born this day 203 years ago.

Dione Occults Rhea

And another Cassini gem - Dione and Rhea pair up as seen by Cassini on April 17. A pair of crescent moons, with the dark side of Dione just beginning to pass in front of its distant sibling's lit side. Gorgeous... the stuff of science fiction, but it's science reality.

Some idea of distance can be gleaned from the relative sizes of these two moons: Dione (in front) is 1,126 kilometers (700 miles) across and Rhea is 1,528 kilometers (949 miles) across.

Hurricanes ... Is Prayer Enough? The Answer is - NO

NOAA (the National Oceanica and Atmospheric Administration) released its prediction for the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season. In short, it's going to be another doozy (thought they don't "expect a repeat of last year" ... "currently"):

NOAA’s 2006 Atlantic hurricane season outlook indicates an 80% chance of an above-normal hurricane season, a 15% chance of a near-normal season, and only a 5% chance of a below-normal season. This outlook is produced by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (CPC), National Hurricane Center (NHC), and Hurricane Research Division (HRD). See NOAA’s definitions of above-, near-, and below-normal seasons.

The outlook calls for a very active 2006 season, with 13-16 named storms, 8-10 hurricanes, and 4-6 major hurricanes. The likely range of the ACE index is 135%-205% of the median. This prediction indicates a continuation of above-normal activity that began in 1995. However, we do not currently expect a repeat of last year’s record season.

The predicted 2006 activity strongly reflects an expected continuation of conditions associated with the multi-decadal signal, which has favored above-normal Atlantic hurricane seasons since 1995. These conditions include considerably warmer than normal sea surface temperatures (SSTs), lower wind shear, reduced sea level pressure, and a more conducive structure of the African easterly jet. An updated Atlantic hurricane outlook will be issued in early August, which begins the peak months (August-October) of the hurricane season.

Take a look at NOAA's News Online announcement for more details.

And hope that FEMA has a better plan than "first of all, pray there's no hurricanes". (Yeah, pray that God suspends the laws of nature for us this year.)

What are they saying?

Just heard on the BBC the end of a story about a village in Afghanistan that was bombed to kill a bunch of Taliban. The BBC was talking about the large number of civilian casualties that accompanied the Taliban ones - it is a village, after all - and Dan Damon, the news reader, asked the reporter what those in charge of the bombing said about the civilian casualties.

Ah, the Beeb ... Just recapped it (5:32 am) as 50 Taliban deaths claimed after a bombing raid while doctors say there were at least 30 civilian deaths and 50 injured

The answer, not surprisingly, was they weren't. Saying anything, I mean.

I know what they were thinking, though: the immortal words of William T. Sherman:

Nits Make Lice

Updated at 6:04 to point out that not even NPR is so much as mentioning the village bombing...

The Week in Entertainment

busy week at work...

TV: House (got a kick out of Cuddy's quantifier-related humor "I thought I'd met all your friend" [sic]); Dr Who (Yes, Mickey: it will always be him and never you)

DVDs: continued with Planetes

read: Angels and Demons (I read The DaVinci Code when it first came out; a student say A&D was better; it is); finished Firewall; started The Republican War on Science for my new commuting read

Baghdad ER

Tom Shales reviews what sounds like a powerful and disturbing film. He begins with

To read political motives into "Baghdad ER," a poignant and powerful documentary about military medical personnel working in Iraq, would be to insult and diminish not only the film but also its subjects. Even so, the right wing has started flapping already, and the Pentagon reputedly finds the movie worrisome.

Truth is always worrisome to those with vested interests.

And this, too, is true.

Spreading Disaster by Ignoring It

The Sudanese genocide in Darfur is now spilling over the borders into Chad. That country is becoming desolate, unstable, and likely to collapse.

And what are we doing, as this happens? We are calling on "all parties" to quit the violence. That's like telling the chickens to quit fighting the fox.

I quote Nicholas Kristoff:

The fighting in Chad, including a battle in the capital, Ndjamena, that reportedly killed 350 people on Thursday, is nominally between the government and rebels. But make no mistake: those "rebels" are simply a proxy force of Sudan, made up in part by the Sudanese janjaweed militias that orchestrated the killing of several black African tribes in Darfur.

The Chadian rebels operate from a base that journalists have visited in Sudan. The rebels' guns, vehicles and uniforms come from the Sudanese government.

Their leader, Mohamed Nour, was handpicked by Sudan to lead this invading force. Sudan's vice president, Ali Osman Taha, has visited Mr. Nour at his base. And the "rebels" often drop by the town of Geneina, where everybody sees that they include some Chadians but also many Sudanese janjaweed fighters.

I know it's easy to say, "But do you have any actual ideas?"

Here are a few - none of them mine to start with, but all of them good.

Interdict the airspace - stop Sudanese warplanes.

Get the UN involved. Make sure Arab/Muslim countries get involved; this is Muslim on Muslim violence, after all; the black Sudanese in the South are just non-Arab, and Muslims need to stand up and say that's not what they're about.

And for crying out loud - feed them.

A planet after all

A while back some of us at work were discussing whether Pluto is a planet or just a Kuiper Belt Object. That day's final word: "Of course Pluto's a planet! It has its own Sailor Soldier!"


Well, Pluto also has moons! Yes, plural. Not just Charon, but two much smaller ones - which may even shepherd a thin ice ring around Pluto. So far, they don't have names (they're just S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2), but here's a nice Hubble shot of them:



So. The Sailor Soldier argument is a bit weak (after all, the Moon has one and Earth doesn't) even if she is an Outer System Senshi, but if Pluto has moons and a ring, it's a planet.

It has to be.

Why I'm Surprised to Hear the Movie Is Bad

Dan Brown is a bad writer - bad in one of the two dimensions that you can be a bad writer in. (I think the reason many linguists and other science-types are so surprised Brown's so successful is that their writing only has that one dimension.)

Brown is a bad stylist, as Geoff Pullum has often blogged about over on Language Log (I'm pointing you at the list of his posts There are 17 results now, though some are rehashing it in view of Mark Steyne's rather liberal lifting of Pullum's stuff.., but I digress).

His metaphors often make you stop dead, and his syntax is odd - he has a tendency to use the wrong arguments for a verb, as in thinking lecture works like say instead of like talk, for instance (as Pullum points out), and that ridicule does, too (as Pullum doesn't mention): that is to say, he writes things like this:

"Terrorism," the professor had lectured, "has a singular goal." (from A&D)

You are white as a ghost, the inmates ridiculed, as the guards marched him in, naked and cold. (from TDVC)

He's also under the impression that rib takes a that clause instead of an about one. (He's not afraid of the tag said, though, and he's mastered the non-tag speech attribution: he's not a beginning writer, just an awkward one.)

I did want to say that there are things Brown does that Pullum doesn't mention, like my favorite (though it's from Angels and Demons not The DaVinci Code:)

[Langdon is visiting CERN.] ...a young man jogged by. His T-shirt proclaimed the message: NO GUT, NO GLORY!

Langdon looked after him, mystified. "Gut?"

"Grand Unified Theory," Kohler quipped. "The theory of everything."

Quipped? That's a quip?

Okay, that's not a problem with syntax. So try this one:

Langdon watched, detached, his mind churning circles like the [helicopter's] blades, wondering if a full night's sleep would make his current disorientation any clearer. Somehow, he doubted it.

To churn circles means to produce circles by vigorous activity. Langdon's mind is producing circles? I think Brown meant churning in circles. Much stranger, though, is the make his disorientation any clearer. When you 'make X (any) more Y' X must have been Y to start with. And, first, what is a 'clear disorientation'? I think it can only be an 'obvious' one. And probably a full night's sleep would have indeed not made Langdon any more clearly disoriented. But I don't think that's what Brown meant. I think what Brown wanted wasn't clear but clear up: would a full night's sleep have cleared up his disorientation any? Syntax.

Also, Brown has a tendency to leap out of the limited 3rd person point-of-view for one brief paragraph, which is disorienting - for instance, in that same scene in A&D, where Langdon is meeting Kohler for the first time, not even having known the man existed two hours earlier. Suddenly, in the midst of a story being narrated strictly from Langdon's viewpoint, we get told this:

Maximilian Kohler, director general of CERN, was known behind his back as König—King. It was a title of fear more than reverence for the figure who ruled over his domain from a wheelchair throne. Although few knew him personally, the horrific story of how he had been crippled was lore at CERN, and there were few who blamed him for his bitterness...nor for his sworn dedication to pure science.

(Actually, speaking of syntax, the use of sworn is a bit strange there, and the use of nor is simply wrong.)

But the main thing is, that Langdon cannot possibly know this, and yet we are supposedly seeing the whole thing through Langdon's eyes. Desire to give the reader more information than the POV subject can know leads to this ... but it jars.

Anyway, the thing is, Brown is a bad writer in the technique of writing.

But he's a damned fine storyteller. He can spin a yarn like nobody's business.

I was really looking forward to seeing the story without the narration.

(I'll probably go anyway. Sir Ian MacKellan is always worth my time.)

You Go, Russ!

Run, Russ, Run.

For President, that is.

Today, a Senate committee approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Thursday, after a shouting match that ended when Sen. Russ Feingold declared his opposition to the amendment, his affinity for the Constitution and his intention to leave the meeting.

Among Feingold's objections was Sen. Arlen Specter's decision to hold the vote in the President's Room, where access by the general public is restricted, instead of in the panel's usual home in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Another was that this measure (passed on purely party lines, with Specter voting for it though he claims he's against it) is pure pandering to the now-sorely-disaffected religious base of the GOP.

So Russ walked out.

You go, Russ! You go!
Run, Russ. Please run.

Papa! Oh, wait, er... Jesus?

Tipping my hat to Number 80, into whose View this swam ...

An unpotted asparagus in Abbey Wood, England, is said to be the face of Jesus. The man who dug it up said,

"I thought, 'Good gracious! It's the face of Jesus.

"It's the most weird thing I have ever seen.

"The roots are fantastic. You can actually make out a thorn crown around his head, his eyes and nose.

"I've heard about Mother Theresa's face being seen in a bagel but I thought this was much better."

The guy added, hilariously:

"It looked so much like His face it took my breath away.

"It has not made me religious. But it could be something supernatural linked to the abbey ruins opposite.

"We don't know what's in the ground."

Yeah. It's not Jesus. It's just supernatural haunted abbey ruins!

ps - the funny thing is, to me? It looks more like Ernest Hemingway...

You be the judge:

Rhea and Enceladus

Another Cassini beauty: Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus passes behind the crescent of larger Rhea...

The images were taken one minute apart as smaller Enceladus (505 kilometers, or 314 miles across) darted behind Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) as seen from the Cassini spacecraft's point of view.

The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 14, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.4 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) from Rhea and 4.1 million kilometers (2.5 million miles) from Enceladus.

Happy Birthday, Frank Capra!

It's a Wonderful Life is okay ...

Why We Fight is a masterpiece ...

You Can't Take It With You and Lost Horizon are terrific.

But It Happened One Night and - especially! - Arsenic and Old Lace are exquisitely funny.

Frank Capra - moviemaker extraordinaire ...

Yes, That's It. I Don't Care

A lot of people are really worked up about Snow becoming Bush's press secretary.

I'm not.

Yes, Snow is a creationist (or possibly an ID supporter, it's a bit unclear). Yes, he's very much an administration shill and lapdog, or has been so far on Fox - which, only to be expected, right?

And that's the point. This is Bush's press secretary we're talking about. Bush himself is on record as supporting the teaching of ID - which means he supports ID, if not outright, possibly even Young Earth, Creationism. Bush is anti-science.

Bush is.

Who did anyone think he would appoint as his mouthpiece? Someone who didn't agree with him? Who do we think he is - Isaac Jaffee? Please.

And even if he had, how much would that person have been allowed to say that wasn't the White House line? That's the job, isn't it?

I can't get worked up about Tony Snow. He's not important enough to get worked up about. At most, he's a distraction, and he's probably not even important enough to be called that.

I mentioned this in comments on a couple of blogs, but mainly ... meh. Like these folks, I decided to not care (yes, I split the infinitive: I decided explicitly to not care) about Tony Snow. There's other stuff to care about, after all.

The Week in Entertainment

TV: House. Veronica Mars (o my... just O. My. This show packs one helluva wallop into the last half of a season ender, doesn't it? Both years). Dr Who - The Doctor Dances! Just this once, everybody lives! And I caught a Midsomer Murder I hadn't seen before.

DVDs: continuing with Planetes

Read: Finished Why We Believe (pretty good, if he does lean a bit on Gould and "nonoverlapping magesteria"), Rage (which somehow I missed before and found listed on the front page of Gone), started Firewall (Henning Mankell, a rather brilliant Swedish mystery novelist)

Happy Birthday, Vaccinations!

On this day in 1796 Edward Jenner performed the world's first successful vaccination, innoculating (as shown in this painting by Robert Thom) a young boy with cowpox to protect him from the scourge of smallpox - 25% of adults and 30% of children who caught it died, over 60 million in the 18th century alone.

Saturn's Nightside

Yet another Cassini stunner from JPL:

This rare color view of Saturn's night side shows how the rings dimly illuminate the southern hemisphere, giving it a dull golden glow. Part of the northern dark side is just visible at top -- the illumination it receives being far less than the south.

The unlit side of the rings is shown here. The portion of the rings closest to Cassini is within the dark shadow of Saturn; the bright distant portion is outside the planet's shadow.

A crescent Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) appears below the rings at left.

What a gorgeous, gorgeous thing. What a wonderful place we live in - and how marvellous that science is giving us the chance to see it.

Here's the Cassini-Huygens Home page

My inner child is .... Oh, dear

Your Inner Child Is Sad

You're a very sensitive soul. You haven't grown that thick skin that most adults have. Easily hurt, you tend to retreat to your comfort zone. You don't let many people in - unless you've trusted them for a long time.

How Is Your Inner Child?

IMO: Why Christians Paint Themselves as Victims

I had an epiphany of my own on the bus home from work today.

I've been reading Michael Shermer's Why We Believe, and I just finished the section dealing with Ghost Dances, Cargo Cults, and other "messianic myths".

Well, I think we call all agree that Christianity is "messianic". I mean, they all but invented the word, right?

But the thing is - the messiah is always coming to rescue his oppressed people from their oppression - from the powers that be, not the powers that will be. Yes?

So how can Christians deserve their Messiah if they are the powers that be?

So this means they have to convince themselves that they're still the downtrodden. (Unlike their forebears - or non-fundamentalist contemporaries - who were content to be building Christ's Kingdom on Earth, they have to hate the World. Or at least say they do.)

Okay, so maybe it's a little bitty epiphany, but it makes sense to me.

Now if only we could get them to actually agree to be the oppressed minority....

Slow Blogging Ahead

My loyal two or three readers may have noticed a slow-down in blogging. While others out there are reaching the end of their semesters, and are therefore (if students) free to blog more or (if professors) bogged down by grading, my institution doesn't run on the semester system, and I've started a new class, which is intensive enough (on me, an off-the-scale introvert) to make me tired in the evenings.

Posting will be sporadic for the next several months.

Poor Richard Cohen - He really doesn't get it

I'm not going to send him an email, 'cause he won't bother to read it (he admits as much), but I'd like to sit him down and explain that for many of us, it's not that he didn't think Stephen Colbert was funny.

It's that he called Colbert "a bully" for not sucking up to W at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

It's that he actually thinks you shouldn't tell the President something he won't enjoy hearing.

It's that he thinks Democrats shouldn't be angry. We should just smile and elect someone else who might as well be a Republican - if we don't just let an actual Republican win.

It's that he actually admits that

Institution after institution failed America -- the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have

and yet doesn't think that we should be angry.

God'll Get You (Not That I Believe In God, Mind You, But He'll Get You!)

From today/s WashPo chat on "Religion and the Family", featuring Annette Mahoney, professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Mahoney is one of the country's few research psychologists specializing in religion and families:

Washington, D.C.: I am not a religious person, haven't been since 4th grade when the contradictions in my church became pretty obvious. And I would prefer if my children were not brought up in any one denomination b/c I think they're all "wrong." But the one thing I can't figure is how am I going to teach morality (why it is wrong to steal, for instance) without the threat of a vengeful God? I don't think a child can wrap its mind around philosophical reasons why it is wrong, and instead needs the simple threat of God will be mad at you. Any recommendations for agnostics?

Annette Mahoney: Children actually can learn to be moral without resorting to threats from a vengeful God. In fact, I would not recommend this approach even if you were a believer.

Can I get an AMEN!

No, seriously. I'm so glad to hear this.

It's bad enough that many people seem to actually believe that only threats of hellfire keep anyone moral, but to contemplate teaching it to a child when you don't even believe it?

Some people simply astound me.

We are the Soviet Union

As a friend said, "It's official: we've become the Soviet Union. 'Comrade, your address to the local agricultural committee did not contain enough references to the works of Comrade Lenin.'"

As Al Kamen reported,

Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration "talking points" -- saying things such as "President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq" -- in every speech they give for the department.

"The President has requested that all members of his cabinet and sub-cabinet incorporate message points on the Global War on Terror into speeches, including specific examples of what each agency is doing to aid the reconstruction of Iraq," the May 2 e-mail from USDA speechwriter Heather Vaughn began.

...

Another attachment "contains specific examples of GWOT messages within agriculture speeches. Please use these message points as often as possible and send Harry Phillips , USDA's director of speechwriting, a weekly email summarizing the event, date and location of each speech incorporating the attached language. Your responses will be included in a weekly account sent to the White House."

This scoreboard, of course, will ensure you give it your best shot.

Now, you might still be scratching your heads, trying to figure out how this is going to work when people expect a talk about agriculture issues. Not to worry. The attachments -- which can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/fedpage -- show how easy it is to work a little Iraq happy talk into just about anything.

There's a sample introduction: "Several topics I'd like to talk about today -- Farm Bill, trade with Japan, WTO, avian flu . . . but before I do, let me touch on a subject people always ask about . . . progress in Iraq." See? Smooth as silk.

So then you talk about how "we are helping the Iraqi people build a lasting democracy that is peaceful and prosperous." If it looks like the audience is with you, try to slip in the old Iraq/al-Qaeda/terrorism link and say Americans are helping build a country "that will never again be a safe haven for terrorists."

I'm just speechless.

Waging War and Saving Souls

And this too is from today's White House Briefing by Dan Froomkin.

Read it carefully.

No, don't get hung up on what are the probably unavoidable glitches that come with extemporaneous speaking. Everybody makes these performance errors. Don't get caught up thinking about them.

Look at what W is actually saying here:

Here's video of a largely overlooked interview Bush had with conservative CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow on Friday.

Kudlow asked Bush to comment on the new movie, "United 93," about the September 11 uprising on a United Airlines plane before it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

Bush said he hadn't seen the movie, but said he agreed with the description of David Beamer , whose son Todd died in the crash, and who recently called the uprising the "first successful counterattack in our homeland in this new global war--World War III."

Said Bush: "I believe that. I believe that. I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III."

[edited bit about another, earlier, speech]

In the Kudlow interview, Bush continued, somewhat unintelligibly: "War is terrible. But it, war brings out, you know, in some ways it it it it touches the core of Americans who volunteer to go in to combat to protect their, their souls. It touches something unique I think about our country that there are people who in the face of danger say 'I want to help. I want to, I want to save lives. I want to, uh, serve my country.' And, um, we see that here. We've seen that throughout our nation's history. And we're seeing it here in the 21st century."

[emphasis mine]

War as a way to "touch the core of Americans".

And war as a way "to save lives".

Scary stuff.

Probable Cause? Not per Haydn

From Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing 8 May...

One thing we do know is that Hayden didn't only misinterpret the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution during a January speech at the National Press Club; he sanctimoniously tried to correct a reporter who got it right.

Here's the Fourth Amendment : "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

When Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder Newspapers properly characterized it, Hayden insisted, incorrectly, that that requirement for search and seizure was reasonableness, rather than probable cause.

Said Hayden: "Just to be very clear -- and believe me, if there's any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you've raised to me -- and I'm not a lawyer, and don't want to become one -- what you've raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is 'reasonable.' And we believe -- I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we're doing is reasonable."

Well, it's nice to know he's convinced. If if only he - and they - were correct.

Deep Within Us

From Carl Zimmer over at The Loom comes this pointer to an essay about Tiktaalik and its significance by Neil Shubin, one of Tiktaalik's finders.

From the introduction by John Brockman:

When we look back after 370 million years of evolution, the invasion of land by fish appears special. However, if we could transport ourselves by time machine to this early period, it isn't clear whether we would notice anything extraordinary. We would see a lot of fish, some of them big and some of them small, all of them struggling to survive and reproduce. Only now, 370 million years later, do we see that one of those fish sat at the base of a huge branch of the tree of life—a branch that includes everything from salamanders to humans. It would have taken an uncanny sixth sense for us to have predicted this outcome when our time machine deposited us in the middle of the Devonian.

Shubin says:

"We live in an age of discovery where the classic stories of evolution have become the focus of vigorous new approaches from genetics and developmental biology. Breakthroughs in genetics are beginning to tell us how bodies are built, in essence giving insights into the recipe that builds animals from a single celled egg. Couple these breakthroughs with the remarkable fossil discoveries of the past decade, and we have opportunity to present a new worldview of the human body.

One of the most important things Shubin says is this:

We now know that the "great" transformation from water to land has so many fossil intermediates that we can no longer conveniently distinguish between fish and tetrapod, that living fish are bridging the water-to-land transition today, that some of the genes implicated in the ancient transition still reside and mutate in living animals, making everything from fish fins to human hands.

Check it out: it's a lovely piece of writing, especially in its final, summary paragraphs.

The Week in Entertainment

TV: House 2-parter!, Veronica Mars, Dr Who (favorite bit of dialog:)

Rose: A month? We were right behind it!
Doctor: It was jumping time tracks all over the place! We're bound to be a little behind.
Rose: How much is a little?
Doctor: A bit.
Rose: Is that exactly a bit?
Doctor: ...Ish.

DVD: Poirot Movie Collection 4, Hoodwinked!, continued with Planetes

Read: Problem Child (Sisters Grimm #3), Behind the Curtain, Your Whole Family Is Made Of Meat, and began Michael Shermer's How We Believe

The Homeless Are Frauds

I'm not linking to it - I won't give them the satisfaction. Rick Detorie's One Big Happy for today teaches children not to give money to the homeless, because they're frauds and fakes. What a lovely Sunday message.

Not.

Happy Birthday, David Hume

Edinburgh, Scotland. Around the turn of the 18th century it was one of the poorest and most backward cities in Western Europe. Alcoholism was rampant even though (or maybe because?) the religious climate was extremely strict. If anyone didn't attend church on the Sabbath, there was a volunteer group of religious police known as the Seizers who would grab them on the street and forcibly take them to mass - a chilling thought, no?

In 1697, 18-year-old college student Thomas Aikenhead was put on trial for saying openly among his friends that he thought Christianity was "ill-invented nonsense." He was convicted and hanged for blasphemy. In 1755, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland tried to prosecute and excommunicate Hume for his skepticism about religion. It was only sixty years after Aikenhead was hanged to death for similar charges, but the case against Hume was dismissed - his clerical friends argued that as an atheist, he was not under the church's jurisdiction.

In the slightly less than sixty years between the two trials, the Enlightenment had happened. And David Hume was one of its leaders.

Hume was a skeptic, and an atheist, and among his many theories he often dealt with religion. The problem of miracles, for instance, in which he argued that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature by God, and that it's impossible to violate the laws of nature. He claimed that human testimony could never be reliable enough to countermand the evidence we have for the laws of nature. At the very least, he said, we require strong supporting evidence to defeat our initial presumptions. In more familar form: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

He also took on Intelligent Design:

One of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God is the design argument – that all the order and 'purpose' in the world bespeaks a divine origin. Hume gave the classic criticism of the design argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and though the issue is far from dead, many are convinced that Hume killed the argument for good. Here are some of his points:

1. For the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is observed regularly, resulting from presumably mindless processes like snowflake or crystal generation. Design accounts for only a tiny part of our experience with order and 'purpose'.
2. Furthermore, the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience with objects, we can recognise human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and a brick wall. But in order to point to a designed Universe, we would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied.
3. Even if the design argument is completely successful, it could not (in and of itself) establish a robust theism; one could easily reach the conclusion that the universe's configuration is the result of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears only a remote similarity to human design.
4. If a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God's mind (being so well-ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind; but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?
5. Often, what appears to be purpose, where it looks like object X has feature F in order to secure some outcome O, is better explained by a filtering process: that is, object X wouldn't be around did it not possess feature F, and outcome O is only interesting to us as a human projection of goals onto nature. This mechanical explanation of teleology anticipated natural selection.

[Summary from Wikipedia]

So Happy Birthday, David. Your Enlightment screwed up our understanding of English, but it moved us far along the paths of knowledge in other, arguable more important, areas. And it put paid to executions for heresy.

Happy Birthday,Tchaikovsky!

Sublime music.

In Tschaikovsky's case, fueled by the agony of his battle with his nature. In Russia at the time, homosexuality was illegal. Desperate to escape, he married a music student - the marriage was, of course, a disaster, and he attempted suicide within two weeks of the marriage - still on his honeymoon. He fled to Florence, never saw his wife again (though they remained married till her death) and wrote to his brother Anatoly: “Only now, especially after the tale of my marriage, have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.”

This is pretty accurate

Another one that works pretty well - hey, unlike the What Kind of Atheist one, I could at least answer the questions!

You Should Be a Film Writer

You don't just create compelling stories, you see them as clearly as a movie in your mind. You have a knack for details and dialogue. You can really make a character come to life. Chances are, you enjoy creating all types of stories. The joy is in the storytelling. And nothing would please you more than millions of people seeing your story on the big screen!

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Red and Red Jr

Hubble delivers as nicely as Cassini - the old pro keeps ticking along, with sharp and gorgeous photos, such as these of Jupiter and its Great Red Spot and the new little one - mind you, Red Jr is bigger than Earth.

These brilliant shots were taken in April, 2006, by Hubble. They show that Jupiter has acquired a new storm, first detected in February. It's called, officially, 'Oval BA' (no, not after Phil Plait), and Red, Jr, as a nickname. The Great Red Spot is a storm that's been raging for centuries - Red, Jr is a chance for us to study weather on our planet's biggest sibling.

Trés cool, no?

Irony Dead? Redux

So, I'm going to the Target this afternoon, and there it is. Huge - no, monstrous - black, shiny ... probably gets 15 mpg, and parked - as so many people seem to park - as though the white lines are where the tires go. This behemoth is taking four parking spots, actually, since anything smaller than a motorcycle would be cramped.

The license plate reads:

GO4GOD

Mr Cheney, oh Mr Cheney

BBC news says "Vice President Dick Cheney accuses Russia of repressing human rights"

No! Really? What was your first clue, Dick?

Of course, at least you didn't look into Putin's eyes and see his soul... (no, I will not repeat my brother's quip of 'takes one to know one' here).

Of course, the whole "anti-Russian cordon" thing is just the flip side of the 'near abroad' - Russia's historical paranoia resurfacing. But from Cheney, this next bit is too damn much:

"And no one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor."

(Someone far away, though, that's different... ooo, did I say that out loud?)

It also doesn't help much when you scoot off from Russia to snuggle up to Nazarbayev. Or when Aliyev gets the red carpet treatment in Washington.

Happy Birthday, Darwin's Bulldog!

Today in 1825 Thomas Huxley was born.

Huxley was a passionate defender of Darwin's theory – so passionate that he has been called "Darwin's Bulldog" – and also a great biologist in his own right, who did original research in zoology and paleontology.

He is best known for his famous debate in June 1860, at the British Association meeting at Oxford. His opponent, Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce, was not-so-affectionately known as "Soapy Sam" for his renowned slipperiness in debate. During the debate, Archbishop Wilberforce ridiculed evolution and asked Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his grandmother's side or his grandfather's. Accounts vary as to exactly what happened next, but according to one telling of the story, Huxley muttered "The Lord hath delivered him into my hands," and then rose to give a brilliant defense of Darwin's theory, concluding with the rejoinder, "I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth."

All accounts agree that Huxley trounced Wilberforce in the debate, defending evolution as the best explanation yet advanced for species diversity.

However, Huxley did not blindly follow Darwin's theory, and critiqued it even as he was defending it. In particular, where Darwin had seen evolution and a slow, gradual, continuous process, Huxley thought that an evolving lineage might make rapid jumps, or saltations. As he wrote to Darwin just before publication of the Origin of Species, "You have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum [Nature does not make leaps] so unreservedly."

Huxley's most famous writing, published in 1863, is Evidence on Man's Place in Nature. This book, published only five years after Darwin's Origin of Species, was a comprehensive review of what was known at the time about primate and human paleontology and ethology. More than that, it was the first attempt to apply evolution explicitly to the human race. Huxley explicitly presented evidence for human evolution.

[text from the UC Berkeley page on Huxley]

National Day of ... What?

That's not what????? by the way. It's just a question.

What day is tomorrow, and what does our choice of its name say about us and which direction we're going? Is our hurricane response really starting with praying for no more hurricanes? How well has that worked in the past - does anybody really think no one was praying as Katrina bore down inexorably upon the Gulf Coast?

Not to stir up trouble, but remember how well Bush's FEMA worked - no, seriously - how well it worked in Florida in 2004? Four hurricanes, $22 billion, less than 100 dead. No praying - just work. For instance, just one of them:

Hurricane Charley in August 2004 saw FEMA, National Guard troops, relief supplies and President Bush on stand by before the storm even made landfall. As the St. Petersburg Times reported on August 17th, 2004, "Governor Jeb Bush sought federal help Friday while Charley was still in the Gulf of Mexico. President Bush approved the aid about an hour after the hurricane made landfall." Cargo planes flew FEMA supplies supplies from a Georgia Air Force base to a staging area in Lakeland, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had stockpiled 11 truckloads of water and 14 truckloads of ice. Guy Daines, the former Pinellas County director of emergency services, was pleased and impressed with the rapid response of the National Guard and the delivery of pre-positioned supplies, stating "It amazed me how they got over 4,000 National Guard troops in there that quick. Rather than sit there and react, they are trying to get a jump-start on everything." [read the entire rundown here from perrspectives here]

Anyway ... tomorrow is the National Day of Prayer, if you lean that way.



It's also the National Day of Reason.

That's how I lean. How about you?

Another Cassini Stunner

Gorgeous, isn't it?

Not retilted from the original picture (unlike the one below), this one show's Saturn's northern hemisphere to the left, blue (for the same reason Earth's skies look blue) and with the rings' shadows spread out in all their complexity; and the golden equatorial regions, Saturn's natural color (why not blue? we aren't sure yet, but possibly the clouds there are higher - maybe the deeper blue in the north is a seasonal effect); and then the southern hemisphere, pale mauve and blue and butterscotch...

That thin line bisecting the planet is the rings seen dead on, and that little bump at the top (to the east) is the shepherd moon Enceladus (515 km/314 miles across). (Epimetheus, two posts below, is only 71 miles across - big Titan is 5150 km/3200 miles across (bigger than Mercury!) and our Moon, for comparison, is 3500 km/2174 miles across. Saturn has it all!)

Cassini just keeps on sending us these gorgeous pictures.

I, Too, Am Reeling

(Actually, no, I'm not. Or not from surprise, anyway.)

Who Said Irony Is Dead?

Tell me it's not just me. Is this woman's choice of signs deeply weird, or what?

In Houston, Leslie Wetzel, a director of U.S. Border Watch, was one of two anti-immigration protesters outside the office of Senator John Cornyn, a Republican. She carried signs that said, "Remember the Alamo" and "Come and Take It."

In response, Ms. Wetzel said, advocates for immigrants pushed bullhorns in her face and tried otherwise to intimidate her.

"They should all be put on a bus and deported," she said. "If you're illegal, you're out of here. Period. It's not a racist thing. It's a question of law and order. Either we're a nation of law, or we're going to be a nation of anarchy." [NYT 2 May 2006]

Let's pass over the whole "come and take it" thing - what, she was so impressed by Bush's "Bring it on!" shtick that she didn't notice how well it played in the audience? But, that's not the really weird part.

I'm trying to reconcile the Alamo with "a nation of law"... but it's not happening. Especially given the essentially lawless takeover of Texas by Americans who immigrated to Mexico and then seized control of the area when the Mexican government passed laws they didn't like (one of which was, by the way, an anti-slavery law).

Like I said, deeply weird.

Cassini Delivers the Goods

From Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy Blog, via the the JPL Cassini-Huygens Mission Page, comes this stunning, four-day-old (yes: taken April 28, 2006) image of Titan, the rings, and Epimetheus.

This is beyond cool. Better than sci-fi.

This is SCI.

Navajo: Unwritten? Not quite, but maybe ...

My TV Guide came today, and it contained this listing:

Navajo Warriors: The Great Secret. Military, 8/7c Six Navajo veterans representing three generations discuss their lives as U.S. Marines and how they were enlisted by the Corps to put their unwritten language to use as a code in WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq. (page 69, vol 54, no 19 issue #2771 May 9-14, 2006)

A couple of minutes poking around on the Net brought me to the Navajo Language Academy, where I can easily see that grammars, dictionaries, and so on have been written for Navajo for more than a century.

It does, however, appear to be true that any widespread schooling in Navajo - formal schooling, with literacy - didn't come about until after WWII. "Unwritten" may refer to this usage, rather than an ability to write it. Nonetheless, the sentence still strikes me as odd: it implies that the language remains unwritten today ("Vietnam, and Iraq"), which is not true.

Unfortunately, I don't get the Military Channel, so I won't be able to see if this claim is addressed in any way.

For those interested:

Eaton, J.H. (1852)

"Vocabulary of the language of the Navajo," in H.R. Schoolcraft (ed.) Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States.

The first extensive Navajo vocabulary.

Franciscan Fathers (1910)

An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navajo Language. Saint Michaels, Arizona: The Franciscan Fathers. Reprinted by Saint Michael's Press, Saint Michaels, Arizona, 1968.

Franciscan Fathers (1912)

A Vocabulary of the Navajo Language. Saint Michaels, Arizona: The Franciscan Fathers. Two volumes.

The first Navajo dictionary.

Haile, Father Berard (1926)

A Manual of Navajo Grammar. St. Michaels, Arizona: The Franciscan Fathers.

Simpson, Lt. James H. (1849)

Journal of a Military Reconnaissance from Santa Fe, New Mexico to the Navajo Country in 1844.

An early vocabulary.