Porlock Junior

Soapy Sam redivivus

2008-01-11T21:29:00.000-08:00

I really ought to post here occasionally, but I don't. Getting addicted to putting up comments elsewhere. I think I'll cross-post one I did today.

First off, know that William Wilberforce, a major hero of the anti-slavery movement, had a son named Samuel, known to contemporaries as Soapy Sam, who became Bishop of Oxford, based at Christ Church [not College], Oxford, where he ordained as a deacon a shy don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. But none of this compares in fame with the time when he went to a scientific meeting and asked one speaker, Thomas H. Huxley, whether he claimed descent from an ape on his grandmother's or his grandfather's side. (Which grandmother? Which grandfather? Why not mother and father? Don't ask me, I'm not a Victorian.)

The news, reported by Tristero at Hullabaloo, is that the eminent Mr. Huckabee has cleverly remarked "If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, that's fine. I'll accept that. I just don't happen to think that I did." (Isn't he just your typical American yahoo? He just happens to believe things. Explains a lot.) So I was obliged to comment:

All I can say is, I'd rather claim descent from the meanest ape in the jungle than from a man with all the advantages of a 20th-century education and access to the best scientists, and holding a powerful political office and vying for the chance to direct the greatest nation on Earth, who brings the discussion of a scientific question down to the level of a piece of personal ridicule that was stale a hundred years ago.

I lied. It's not all I can say.

AND who claims to be an American, born in the country whose patriots bled 200 years ago to get rid of Kings and Dukes and stuff, who thinks it matters who your great-grandfather was instead of who YOU are and what you've done.

By the way, Mr. Huckabee, where was your great-great-great grandfather on the day the Revolution started? Resting on the reputation of ~~their~~his great ancestors? Mine was *improving* on the achievements of his simian ancestors by fighting at Concord.

[Sorry for the patriotic snobbery, but there you are, you try to argue with a pig and preserve your personal daintiness.]

Bureaucratic trivia

2007-10-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

Recently I durn near lost all the contents of my Palm thingie and wound up reviewing a lot of the restored notes, including some travel notes from a couple of years ago in London. Then just now I saw Orac's captioning contest and its comments. The association reminded me of a trivia question:

What was the first use of a printed form by a bureuacracy? When, what bureaucracy, what purpose?

Bonus: Isn't it ironic? Explain.

Answers the next time I get around to posting something. Also, another printing-trivia question.

Be all you can be

2007-09-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

Now this is recruiting, from NASA, for astronaut positions:

The open positions require extensive travel on Earth and in space. Possible destinations may include, but are not limited to, Texas, Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, the International Space Station and the moon.

h/t to Unspeak. Which btw is a blog worth following.

Update, 2007-09-22:
A few posts farther down there is a nice take-down of some 9/11 rantings by Martin Amis. This in itself might not warrant a visit, but the comments thread, in the 20s after the 9/11 conspiracy theorist has had his say, is rewarding, as it drifts into the truth about Nazi analogies. The participants are not afraid to ask just what Hitler did that was so bad, anyway; as with pretty much any question to which everyone knows the answer, serious consideration of it clarifies the mind. Read it, and you'll be able to flout Godwin's Law (as it is usually misconstrued) with authority.

This blog rated R

2007-06-23T22:18:00.002-07:00

Well, I'll be gosh-darned, I didn't know I wrote such dirty stuff. Moreover, you'd think it would be rated C for Comatose.

But mingle2 knows best. According to their simple, free, automated and therefore infallible test, no one under 17 should see this stuff. Unlike so many purveyors of cute quizzes, they provide the reason:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

gun (7x)
torture (4x)
death (3x)
dead (2x)
sex (1x)

There you are, folks, discussing the Administration's policies is obscene and not fit for the kiddies. Knew that already, didn't you?

Give that photographer a Pulitzer

2007-05-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

This was in the paper today.

Raising the flag over Mount (post office) Greenburg, Kansas. [Not their caption]

What can I say?

Well, I guess I can say, "We're from the Government, and we're here to help." Remember that side-splittingly funny line from a few years ago? Now, of course, it's "We're from the Government, and we want to help, but our people and equipment are on the other side of the world, and anyway the Boss would rather make the point that government doesn't work."

But there was even better news on that same page of the Chronicle this morning. An ad covering 2/3 of the page announces that Jean Paul Gaultier has released a new fragrance for men, called --

Fleur du Male

Personally I think that the ad has sort of a Bawdy Air.

Belated final comment on Virginia Tech

2007-05-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

The news cycle is over; the tumult and the shouting dies; the vultures and the Faux depart. Orac has, naturally, found the ultimate worst comments on the shootings; you don't want to follow the link he provides; remember, he's a cancer surgeon and has a stronger stomach than mere mortals.

But within the range of what passes for normal commentary, there's stuff too stupid and malicious to deserve comment, but still needing it.

A friend saw a piece by one James Lewis in which the corruption of Cho by evil professors was documented, and asked people on his mailing list for comments on it. Being lazy and intolerant, I replied by merely listing a places where reasonable comment might be found. But Mauri Laitinen, an old friend and business associate, put the time into taking it apart in detail.

I think it's a particularly good job, and deserves to be on record in a place more public than a few people's e-mail archives. So, with his permission, here is the entire post.

At first, I thought it was just an example of using some sensational
event as a pretext for attacking some group or institution through
guilt by association. A tired, old technique. But as I looked at
it more, it appears to be also a deliberate and unjustified smear.

James Lewis, in the inappropriately named "American Thinker" blog,
answers his own question in the first paragraph. College does not
drive you crazy, at least in the literal sense. Of the thousands of
English majors who move through American universities, most do not
commit mass murder. They are not the people one sees living on the
streets; they aren't the people who go back after getting poor job
reviews to kill their bosses; and for the most part, they don't look
forward to careers wearing paper hats and asking customers if they
want fries. Many English majors, I've heard, go on to become
productive members of society.

Cho Seung-hui was violently psychotic. Apparently he had displayed
problems for some time. While Cho might have shared all the
confusion about identity, gender roles, morality, and the fairness
of social institutions that most students feel when they are first
exposed to university, it wasn't the cause of his psychosis; it
probably wasn't even the trigger.

It is disingenuous of Lewis to portray Cho as an intellectually
defenseless "resident alien." He'd been in the country since he was
eight and had probably gone through a pretty-good suburban Virginia
school system. It is likely that Cho had gotten into VT based on
merit rather than legacy or affirmative action. He had to be pretty
Americanized by the time he hit college. So much for "massive
culture shock." (OK, so I don't know for sure that Cho's parents
didn't keep him locked in his room until, inexplicably, they decided
to ship him off to university. I just doubt it.)

But surely Lewis doesn't believe any more than we do that Cho's
college classes caused him to become homicidal. It's merely an
excuse to launch off on a catalog of academic outrages. And it's
here that I have my biggest objection to the article. His examples
don't stand up to scrutiny.

Take Nikki Giovanni, a nationally known and much honored poet. What
Lewis calls her "self glorifying book" is actually a set of
collected autobiographical essays. Considering that the 64 year-old
writer participated in the civil rights movement in the South, she
might have something interesting to say. If you hopped down to
Barnes & Noble you could most likely find at least one of her poetry
books in which she deals with such radical subjects as summer,
growing older, and love of family. Yes, she also deals with racism
and the black experience, and the stuff she wrote in the sixties was
pretty aggressive, but her message for many years now has been one
of hope and optimism.

Lewis leads you to believe that Shoshana Knapp approves of
self-justifying criminals, but that is like saying a course on
mystery novels is equivalent to an endorsement of crime. And most
of her work seems to be analyses of 19th century literature.

Bernice Hausman is a feminist. Writing and researching about sex
change operations and gender identity is an issue in the news and
popular culture, so it strikes me as a legitimate area of
study. There's no evidence whatsoever that Hausman was encouraging
students to doubt their own sexual orientation or dress up like Milton Berle.

Yes, indeed, Paul Heilker wrote "Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of
the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The
Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)" in
1992. I don't have access to the journal in which it was published,
but I note from his CV that virtually everything he's written before
or since had to do with teaching composition. If I can remember
that far back I think it was actually a current reference to the
"Saturday Night Live" Hans and Franz skits. I think it's probably
an essay with a humorous title about teaching composition. In other
words, Lewis has served up another helping of red herring.

I especially like the reference to Lisa Norris' Toy Guns, and Lewis'
assertion that he doesn't know any Americans who are in love with
war. Well maybe he's right; I'll check with Dick Cheney right after
I get back from the matinee of "Grindhouse." Seriously, a professor
who writes fiction about guns and violence is somehow
suspect? Looked at the paperbacks they sell in any US supermarket
lately, rented any videos, watched any TV?

And Sheila Carter-Tod? If you look at her unremarkable website, you
find that she teaches composition, especially graduate dissertation
composition. As a side issue, which she clearly labeled
non-academic publications, she examined cases of backlash against
Muslims after 9/11 for the US Civil Rights Commission. This is radical?

Probably the most deceptive of Lewis' descriptions is that of Susan
C. Allender-Hagedorn. This fiery revolutionary perverts her
students' minds by teaching technical writing. She also has a
couple of external links on her web page to comics and to feminist
science fiction.

Then there was a Marxist, ho hum, and Professor Collier, who writes
about metacognition as applied to scientific thought. We must
differentiate between inducements to rage and inducements to
sleeping through class.

So what I'm saying is that James Lewis dug through the VT English
faculty websites, found--or in some cases manufactured--sensational
non-representative tidbits, speculated wildly that Cho had been
force-fed the most extreme social ideas, and used these
misrepresentations to smear VT and liberal arts education in
general. I had assumed that Lewis' examples might at least be real,
the sort of silly, offensive, or incomprehensible stuff you find in
obscure, refereed literary journals. There is no shortage of
them. But Lewis doesn't bother finding such examples; he just
misrepresents the facts.

It's worth noting that undergraduate students don't pore over their
professors' web sites or read their professors' esoteric papers on
disturbing social topics. (It's hard enough to get them to log on
long enough to find the next assignment's due date.) In fact, most
academic papers in most academic fields, both in the sciences and
the arts, go largely unread because they are too specialized or too
boring. The typical undergraduate English Lit curriculum is still
largely Beowulf, Shakespeare, 19th century novels, poetry, and one
or two courses on 20th century lit. At most, an undergraduate might
have to take one or two criticism classes where he or she might be
exposed to more extreme ideas, but somehow, such exposure just fails
to radicalize.

Finally, I think his interpretation--and elisions--of Nikki
Giovanni's poem, "We do not understand this tragedy" suggest
deliberate misrepresentation. I don't think it's a great poem (of
course it was written less than a day after the shootings) but it's
not a rant against capitalism or a paean to "adolescent rage" or an
attempt to deny responsibility. Lewis hopes that you won't bother
to read the poem yourself or read the condolences also on the web
page. If you do, you get a very different sense of what she and the
English Department are saying.

Lewis badly misrepresents the faculty and the English curriculum at
the school. It's just not this hotbed of Marxist, feminist,
anti-American rage that James Lewis has invented in order to
criticize. I've already spent more time than the article
deserves. It just bothers me that such cheap caricatures and
specious causality pass these days for thoughtful analysis.

[The piece was sent as two messages; the second part follows here.]

I've been more sensitive recently to what I consider deliberately
deceitful arguments by bloggers & newspaper columnists. Victor
Davis Hanson, who appears regularly in the SF Chronicle, is a master
of the false premise. Many bloggers seem happy to insinuate or
attack using made-up data. Or they just attack for fun. Before
blogging there were newsgroups. I stopped reading them because most
of the posts were so petty. Blogs, if anything, are
worse. Bloggers seem to feel no obligation to write truly
thoughtful articles, and readers rarely respond with thoughtful
critiques. Maybe it's a consequence of getting older, but I find it
dispiriting that thoughtful dialog seems so little valued. What's
wrong with all those stupid, ugly, perverted bastards anyway?

There's lots of Political Correctness in universities. There are
refereed papers, public utterances, conferences and whatnot that are
indistinguishable from parody. A while back you sent out a link to
that joke paper by the physicist Alan Sokal, which was accepted by
"Social Texts." What's even more amazing is that after he revealed
his own hoax, there were literary critics defending his article as
valid social commentary! As you may remember, I went back &
finished my degree a few years back. One of the essays I had to
read and comment on in a lit crit class discussed the threat of
Barbie dolls to a girl's self-image. As the father of 4 daughters,
I never noticed that they compared themselves to the dolls. To
kids, dolls are something to dress, move around, and play with. My
girls never even thought about whether they lived up to Barbie's
impossible physical standards. It's why I don't worry about Molly,
who used to pull the heads off her dolls, or Eileen who claims she
will get us back for giving her Malibu Barbie instead of Ballerina
Barbie. You can hear college students complain about all sorts of
PC things. For example, I remember a radio interviewee describing
herself as a "potential survivor" of harassment. If you think about
it, that means she hasn't been harassed, but she believes she will
survive a non-life-threatening situation. This would be really
disturbing if it weren't for the fact that most of us were just as
silly at that age, and we more or less grew out of it.

I'm not trying to be contrary, really, but I'm not entirely sure
there's an easy solution to murderous rampages. While I agree that
hunters and sportsmen do not need semi-automatic assault rifles,
that's not what Cho used apparently. From the reports I heard, he
had two handguns and a whole shitload of bullet clips. By
"automatic" they mean the same type of gun that the police carry as
standard-issue sidearms. The typical hunting and recreational
target rifles are semi-automatic, meaning that you can pull the
trigger repeatedly, firing a single shot with each pull. Banning
them would mean banning every handgun that wasn't a six-shooter and
every rifle that wasn't a single-shot; that's almost all the guns
made. As a practical political matter, it's a non-starter.

I agree that the gun death statistics are frightening, and something
must be done. But I think that the overwhelming majority of gun
deaths in the US are "accidents." Everybody made jokes about Dick
Cheney shooting his companion in the face, but few people pointed
out that he was an inexperienced hunter and drunk at the
time. Anybody who hunts (and I don't; I find no pleasure in it)
knows that the woods are filled with drunk hunters; it's an accepted
form of behavior. Imagine if the NRA had enough moral courage to
come out and condemn Cheney's reckless behavior and started a "If
you drink, don't shoot" campaign. And just like drunk driving, if
we started prosecuting hunters who were found drunk, we could cut
hunting accidents. We've largely eliminated the "boys will be boys"
excuse for drunk driving; we could do it for hunting. Another large
portion of gun deaths comes from domestic accidents. Again, if the
NRA spent less time justifying the civilian use of body-armor
piercing bullets, and more time running training courses (like the
used to in the fifties & sixties) and hammering home the idea of gun
safety, it would significantly cut the gun death rate. I know most
people don't agree with me, but I still think that we don't focus
enough public disapproval on people who are careless with guns. We
focus instead on the gun or on the tragedy. Not enough time to talk
about gun crime, so I won't. OK, so I'm a raging
conservative-liberal who believes that while most people have the
right to own guns, they mostly shouldn't because they are
stupid. This way I can offend both sides.

But back to Cho. The news media seems to want a simple cause &
solution. I heard one senator say it was a bureaucratic problem
because colleges cannot expel troublesome people. Had Cho been
expelled, it would have given him more freedom to plan his
rampage. As you know, most universities do not control access to
their campuses, which are so large that they cannot be physically
protected. So whether he had been expelled or not, he could have
walked on any time. Others rightly complained about the fact that he
had been referred for psychological evaluation but that he was
released as an out-patient. He was so seriously disturbed that
teachers in the English dept.referred him to a psych eval. Either
the psych eval failed to accurately assess him, or maybe he got
worse. What appears to be true is that his violent tendencies had
been noted and yet he wasn't put into the state database that
prevents the mentally infirm from buying guns. Since we've done
everything we could to gut national handgun registration laws, Cho
was able to buy all the ammo he wanted over the Internet. What
could have been done was with proper registration laws not only
could he have been prevented from buying guns, but the police and
his doctors could have been warned that he was trying to buy
weapons. That might have allowed some sort of intervention and
perhaps commitment to a mental lock-up. Would banning handguns have
prevented this tragedy? Well, no. He could have hidden a machete
and Molotov cocktails in his backpack. It wouldn't have been the
same tragedy, but it still would have been bad. So while we can and
should work to identify dangerous psychotics before they explode, I
don't know whether we could dramatically improve our percentage.

Does this by any chance work?

2007-05-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

N ow that Google has forced me to convert, is it a login change, or will they have screwed up the blog completely, as they have done to various people, on some of whose blogs I can't post a comment telling them that I can no longer post a comment there, because, you know, I can no longer post a comment there?

Testing, testing. If I can't make it work with zero effort, I'll try to get the word out telling where Porlock has moved to, if anywhere.

UPDATE: Yup, it seems to work. Wonder how all those others wound up with such a mess.

Latest meme announced

2007-04-14T01:38:00.000-07:00

(Or maybe it's an old one that I've somehow missed? In any case, there's no such thing as a meme -- pass in on.)

Of course you've been following the Kathy Sierra business. In case you haven't: a blogger who has received fantastically perverted sexual death threats, accompanied by publication of her address and social security number, and being one of those Weaker Vessels, has got all upset about it, and has been instructed by Kos to stop taking herself so seriously, because after all you get lotsa nasty mail when you post about hotly controversial matters, like, in her case, computer program design. In the Pharyngula thread about it, this has popped up twice, seemingly independently:

If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Then go back and get me a sandwich, dammit.

All the girls are wise

2007-01-20T23:49:00.000-08:00

and all the boys are indomitable,

and it goes without saying that all the children are above average,

at Marin General Hospital, where the two most popular baby names in 2006 were Sophia and Alexander.

And let's hear it for that great group, Bernard Knox and The Oldest Dead White European Males.

O Canada! O Falafel!

2007-01-16T01:42:00.000-08:00

Do not miss the show currently playing at Falafel Sex. (Office safe, unless your office has a rule against raucous laughter.)

I should perhaps mention that experiments of this nature have been performed not just recently, as stated in the report, but starting about 50 years ago. The results, however, were rather different.

What part do you still not understand?

2007-01-13T22:58:00.000-08:00

Postings Just say no to torture; Or, What part of No exceptional circumstances whatsoever don't you understand? and Horse: I'm not dead yet are incorporated in this document by reference.

Naturally, the real officers who make policy for real soldiers fighting an all too real war do understand it perfectly well.

Perhaps all the blogs in the world covered this on the couple of days I had the flu, and if so, I apologize for the waste. Anyway, the current (February 2007) issue of Harper's has an excerpt from the new edition of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, prepared by the United States Army and Marine Corps and released in December, after 20 years in which the previous edition held. (The new issue is not up on the site yet, oddly enough; but the text would be firewalled anyway if it were.)

LIMITS ON INTERROGATION
During the Algerian War of Independence, French leaders decided to permit torture against suspected insurgents. Though they were aware that it was against the law and morality of war, they argued that this was a new form of war and these rules did not apply. Illegal and immoral activities made the counterinsurgents extremely vulnerable to enemy propaganda inside Algeria among the Muslim population as well as in the United Nations and the French media. Torture is never a morally permissible option, even in situations where lives depend on gaining information. No exceptional curcumstances permit its use. In the end, failure to comply with moral and legal restrictions against torture severely undermined French efforts and, despite a number of significant military victories, contributed to France's defeat.

If you are of high moral standards, you will be offended by the mix of moralizing with pragmatic war-winning policy. Be my guest. Please excuse me from joining in. But they do understand No exceptional circumstances.

By the way, now that Lewis Lapham has retired, the Notebook apparently is written by a rotating group of editors; so far it has not suffered. This month, Barbara Ehrenreich, no less, writing agains Hope and positive thinking. The passage that almost covered my nice new issue with stains of spluttered tea:

Cancer? See it positively, as a "growth opportunity," and hopefully not just for the tumor.

The rest of it is up to that standard. And don't miss the sidebar "Paper Jam" on page 22, which it would be too hard to explain.

When the most dignified person...

2007-01-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

...at an execution is the mass murderer, you know something isn't going well.
[that guy on the Daily Show, quoted approximately, because I can't find a transcript.]

But the quote that's so obvious that everyone must have been citing it, and only an international conspiracy can account for my not having seen it mentioned once in the masses of commentary, is

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
[Macbeth, Act I scene iv]

However, Ms Four Sigma, whose wisdom in these matters is sometimes delayed by the salutary practice of avoiding the news, noted another text:

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng'd. That would be scann'd.
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
[Hamlet, Act III, scene iii]

Fortunately, we don't share those old superstitions about the moment at which a person is killed. Does Moqtada al-Sadr?

"He is out of touch with his cruelty."

2007-01-05T00:04:00.000-08:00

The competition for statement of the year looks to be tough right out of the gate. This one is from Justin A. Frank, MD, in an interview at Buzzflash, cited at length in the News Blog.

To save you troubling in guessing who the subject is, a little further text:

He is unable to think clearly when presented with new information. He cannot do it. He cannot read. He cannot pay attention to the Baker-Hamilton Report. He never looked at that report. He looked at the opening title, about a new way forward or something, and that’s what he’s been using as his slogan now. He is not able to process information.
I think Cheney, as much as he is malevolent and destructive and greedy and self-interested as an oil executive and wants absolute power, he’s out front about it. I think that he would have to negotiate in a way that’s different because he can’t not think, whereas Bush doesn’t think.

Spitzer-Obama: Still a good ticket for '08

2007-01-02T13:17:00.000-08:00

Franklin Fiorello Spitzer barged into office without too many niceties: took his oath first thing in the morning on Jan. 1, started signing a bunch of executive orders for ethics rules, and was heard to say, "Don't need no stinkin inauguration." Well, not really the last; I understand he took time off that afternoon to speak at the ceremony.

I give him his honorary nicknames as a reminder of how and from whom people can learn to be Democrats; and how the models don't have to be actual Democrats.

What rankles is the reminder that they tend to be from New York. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, whom we love and admire and support and who we hope will not betray us too badly, is doing a four-day whirl of celebrations that has Jon Carroll fuming righeteously this morning. OK, Speaker of the House, that's one thing to celebrate; and the first female Italian-American from California, three more; but can't we economize a little bit in these times of National Sacrifice? Oh, I forgot. If we sacrifice, the terrorists will win.

And whatever Barbara Boxer has been doing, it's not attending to business or paying attention to her consituents. Well, seems I'm not gonna give you a link here about her knuckling under to the recent campaign by various fuming raghead-haters against CAIR, which I saw in some good blog this morning, because I can't find it, and a quick Google News search gives me just one trivial item other than link after link after link to neocon bs. Like, we all know Google isn't biased and all that, so it shows that the fascists still dominate the ranking algorithms, and the info you get if you want data on a current story is still wildly weighted (by objective algorithms) toward dangerous malicious nonsese, so stop celebrating the collapse of the influence right blogophere, and gosh, do you think this could be a problem in getting across to the public?

But my proposal two years ago for a 2008 ticket looks at least as good as ever.

And several ponies

2006-12-14T01:15:00.000-08:00

The next time the Poor Man shows us a gusher of ponies, he'll have to think about whether to list their names. Go ahead, take the test. HT to Sunbeams From Cucumbers.

Speaking of the Poor Man, don't miss his rundown on the Democratic aspirants.

Dept. of Unintentional Prophecy: Doonesbury

2006-10-14T21:24:00.000-07:00

For the first part of this story, one must get one's Negropontes straight. Nicholas Negroponte is the MIT Media Lab guy; it's not his fault that his brother is a war criminal. (Well, knowing how siblings are, we should at least give him the benefit of the doubt.) He's the guy who designed the $100-dollar computer with wireless Internet connection, for distribution to people all over the poorer parts of the world. The hundred dollars is the estimated cost once it gets into mass production, and the moment it was announced, jillions of peopole really wanted one; but this is for people who need it. And he's pushing to get it into production and into people's hands.

The second part is about the second Mrs. Doonesbury. As you may recall, Mike met this young programmer at Microsoft, Asian of course (stereotype!), and wound up marrying her. I followed this passively, and it was not for some time that I took some hint in the morning's comic and realized who she was.

You see, that little spat we had in Vietnam affected the lives of Doonesburians, and not only B. D., who wore his football helmet through his combat duty. There was a rather nondescript middle-class couple whose adventures we watched as they dealt with the little Vietnamese war orphan they had adopted. One day Daddy came home to find Mommy very exicted: the baby, who spent a lot of time sitting in front of TV, had said her first word! Namely, "Big Mac".

That's who Mrs. Doonesbury is. I've forgotten the proof, but maybe somebody can dig it up. Professor Weil, are you listening?

Returning to out main story, there's an item over on Amygdala about Negroponte's work with his fabulous machine. He's now got a deal that, if it really works out, will put an Internet-capable laptop in the hands of every schoolchild in Libya. Not your favorite beneficiary, but you've gotta start somewhere, and it's not the kids' fault, you know.

So, the tie-in:

[...] The idea of a laptop for every schoolchild grew out of Mr. Negroponte’s experience in giving children Internet-connected laptops in rural Cambodia. He said the first English word out of the mouths of the Cambodian students was “Google.”

colorless green ideas

2006-10-04T20:43:00.000-07:00

Some day I'll write a real blog posting. Meanwhile, don't miss Brad deLong's discussion of how colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Seriously, you'll be glad you did, provided you don't skip the comments.

What is the Internet?

2006-10-02T23:48:00.000-07:00

People have asked that for a long time, actually years. And it's hard to answer simply; even Ted Stevens, a trained communicator, had some trouble making it entirely clear. Now, though, thanks to Seth Breidbart (no, I don't know who he is) as quoted by JP Stormcrow in a comment (#44) to a post by that's well worth reading for its own sake if you have any use for Bérubé at all, we have a clear, simple one-sentence definition, shorter than these attributions:

It’s the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship “can be reached by an IP packet from”.

When I say coffee...

2006-09-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

I mean Folger's Coffee. There won't be many people old enough and local enough (San Francisco) to recognize that one.

But Folger's is not on the agenda tonight. There are many important things on which I have many important insights at the moment, like what the Pope really said (what he was thinking is beyond me), and the nature of the entity known as Hewlett Packard and how that relates to Mennonites. So, rather than talk of any of those, here is le mot du jour. Passed, as you might say, to us by Orac, who does not take responsibility for its content:

" What does a coffee enema do, and why is it better using Wilsons coffee?"

Gospel music time

2006-09-08T20:40:00.000-07:00

I don't always agree with Pharyngula's recommendations on religious reading and listening matter. OK, I don't often agree. But this is priceless.

As if my personal blogroll weren't too long already.

Update: This Internet thing is expanding my musical horizons. I'm quite taken with this. May have to find their other stuff.

Patience rewarded

2006-09-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

At SadlyNo (via the Poor Man) we have news of a major threat: the Republicans may be losing the kook vote. In evidence we see a characteristically articulate analysis by Kaye Grogan laying out the reasons for that group which she calls Christians to abandon the party as it has abandoned them.

It's best summarized by mdhatter in the comments:

awe nice! that bit at the end

It’s time to start a new viable third party
I knew if we just waited they’d flinch first.

But that's not all; jpj adds,

So, building highways in Texas is a Christian issue. Huh.

It kind of summons up a picture of Kate going down the road to where they are repairing potholes with a huge sign reading, “Repent Sinners!” and screaming, “Blasphemers! You will burn in hell!” at the workers.

But of course! After all, they're paving it with good intentions.

Yo, Nesco!

2006-08-05T00:52:00.000-07:00

Today I figured it out, and I feel much better.

This morning I was befuddled. I had just received an appalling e-mail forward, one of a series on the general subject, which demonstrated by the force of anecdote and analogy how you must deal with an enemy: Hit him and hit him and beat him and beat him up and beat him some more and when he is finally cringing on the floor and moaning for mercy beat him and beat him some more and make him suffer and did I mention beat him some more and then beat him up, and when he has finally mumbled out the words "I was wrong" you will live in peace.

It had some application to current affairs on some other continent. The application was not left to one's own perspicacity. (I could provide documentation to anyone so crazy as to want to confirm that I am not exaggerating.)

This sort of thing used to the be property of red-state lumpenproletariat, ignorant of the world, deliberately and maliciously miseducated, and panicked at the bidding of the government in proportion to their insulation from the rest of the world by thousands of miles of ocean and in some cases an expanse of coastal states, terrified by the hideous thing that happened in New York and therefore requiring much larger DHS appropriations to protect Podunk, while New Yorkers who breathed the toxic smoke and the incinerated and decomposing remains of their fellow citizens have repaired what they could and gone on living and being -- thank God! -- New Yorkers. A thing for which I'm not sure I'd have expected ever to thank Divine Providence.

But no more. Now things like this come from people who are not pig-ignorant, who used to be, and still are in many ways, reasonable people. Largely they are people, and here we approach getting to a point, who belong to some ethnic group that shall not be named here, but I assure you its history in the USA is honorable or maybe stellar, and with a claimed heritage from those who gave us the upper limit of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Alan Dershowitz going over to the dark side may be shrugged off as almost predictable, but there are decent people who seem to be heading his way. Of course, the lever is the same "The very existence of your people is at stake" lies that the red states take from Washington, but the audience is different, or I thought it was. This upsets my lifelong assumptions and is disturbing.

But tonight, driving along and contemplating the necessity of exercising self-discipline to destroy such stuff without reading, so as not to be thinking about its wrongness to such an extent that useful thoughts are displaced, I figured it out. This is not real life.

I have strayed into a production of Rhinoceros.

Another righteous one

2006-07-31T00:15:00.000-07:00

We all know about Oskar Schindler. Lots of us have heard about Chiune Sugihara (whose name I had to look up just now), a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who, acting against his country's ally and disobeying specific orders, issued visas to thousands of Jews. And there was his opposite number John Rabe, a Nazi businessman in Nanking who sheltered thousands of Chinese from the atrocities of his country's ally.

But here's a new one: Dr. Ho Feng Shan, a Chinese diplomat in Vienna who, like Sugihara, issued as many visas to Jews as he could. He was an early bird, managing to get disciplined by his government months before the war started. And a late recognition: only after his death in 1997 did his activities come to light; even his daughter knew almost nothing about them.

Thanks to The Peking Duck, specifically to commenter bingfeng, for this. The blog is the Official Nesting Place of the Faction of Quacking Canards, and you can guess how much I want their proposed t-shirt.

What language do they speak in Iran?

2006-07-29T22:59:00.000-07:00

Another curious coincidence today, and I wish I remembered the term Jon Carroll used for this sort of thing. Not African swallow -- that's something else -- but some ornithological term.

Anyway, I was pondering something, a thing that I might even turn into a blog entry, when an irrelevant question occurred to me; and a few hours later in a completely independent way the question came up and was answered. So I might as well begin with the posting that was dubiously worth writing.

I had occasion this afternoon to muse on irretrievably lost opportunities; only institutional in this case, not personal; but there's a bit of sadness to all such musings. And it occurred to me that while the best short poem of all is "Jenny kissed me when we met", there is one great standout among the quatrains (or Rubaiyat, as we call them in Persian):

The moving finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
--LXXI in Fitzgerald's translation (duh), the popular and successful fifth edition

I admit to the Philistine position that this is an exquisitely constructed bit of verse. The images are striking; the antique diction is well suited to the context. Jenny is a great deal jollier; but then, as Richard Mitchell said,

Children learn what they most need to know from happy stories of the birth of kings, and grown-ups learn again and again what they most need to remember from sad stories of the death of kings.

I wonder what examples of the form, and short verses generally, appeal to people with properly educated taste. Of course, the poem is trivial and obvious. (Hum the "Ride of the Valkyries" (a thoroughly hackneyed piece) and it doesn't sound like much either.) But after all, as Dirac said,

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by
everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

I said "Persian" above, because I like the traditional, classical effect of the name; but, I thought idly, was that the proper name for the language? For that matter, is Farsi exactly, identically the thing named by Persian, or am I messing up my linguistics? So, a few hours later, I am looking at the Language Log, and there's an amusing note on Danish pastry, in which I find "Persian (or if you prefer, Farsi)." Turns out, a lot of the speakers of that language really don't like the foolish Americanism of calling it Farsi. Like talking of Deutsch or Nihongo; or worse, if I read one comment right, though I don't know enough German to read his humorous example.

All right, then, a bunch of people who care think that to say Farsi is to turn your back on thousands of years of Persia's civilization. I can get behind that.

Update: I mean, of course, I can get behind the sentiment of not turning one's back on a civilization, no matter what kind of dangerous twits may be momentarily the keepers of the flame. One can't be too careful what one says in these days of Freedom Fries. And I should have added a Read the Rest rating in the style of Amygdala, and a high one, for the if-you-prefer thread. Joseph Bell is particularly eloquent on the value of using corrupted forms from civilizations with which we have a long history of contact.

Nothing important happened today

2006-07-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

At least, that's the version of George III's famous diary entry cited by Wikipedia. It's pleasant to note that someone has marked the quote with "citation needed"; just try to find a citation, or figure out whether it's "important" or "of importance", by googling. But I digress.

Jon Carroll has written a column that can almost stand with his too-oft-reprinted Thanksgiving column. And if you hurry, you may be the 7,345th person to remind him that the fruited plains are not from Irving Berlin, but from Katherine Lee Bates. A fine piece, though, especially for those of us in that corner toward which, as Carl Sandburg(?) said, the rest of the United States slopes, causing everything loose to roll down into California.

Carroll talks of the land, staying mostly out of the politics. Extremism in defense of California is no vice. Carroll notes that "patriot" refers to "father" in Latin. But (speaking of Berlin), German has not only vaterland but heimat, from "home". A good way of speaking, if you can get over certain unpleasant associations.

Bates, however, had a political agenda, sneakily getting into brotherhood and stuff. (And will God crown my efforts with coherence? Not likely, when I see that the Language Log has annotated Ray Charles's missing of the subjunctive "crown", and that a Google search on crowned good brotherhood brings the good news that most references to the song that are not quoting Ray Charles get the words right.) And it's politics that created this day, and politics that I wanted to talk about.

To get down, then, to the document that we celebrate with John Adams and with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

And by the way, The Star-Spangled Banner is a damn fine song, as is America the Beautiful, even if they both drag God into it, and even if the Banner is warlike and bombastic. Bomburstic. Whaddaya want from a national anthem? At least we're not watering our furrows with the other guys' blood. And as to its being based on a drinking song, I ask you: if you're going to strain your voice, would you do it for "the land of the free and home of the brave" or for "the myrtle of Venus and Bacchus's vine"? Perhaps I'm courting the fate of Hippolytus, but my choice is clear.

So. I hold that the introductory section of the Declaration is self-evident. If you doubt it, you can read many pages of proof in the paper by Stephen E. Lucas. It is also an unsurpassed bit of English prose.

Whan that Aprille with her shoures soote

When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes

When in the course of human events

It need not be embarrassed to stand in that company.

But what about the famous bill of grievances against the King and his country? We all know that it's terribly exaggerated and unfair. And "merciless Indian savages," good heavens! But what about it, really? Wouldn't if be nice to see a sober annotation and analysis of the list? Lucas treats of the list, but his treatment is trivial: he analyzes the grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It looks to be a good analysis (haven't read it through yet), and by no means trivial; but I'd like to see a discussion of the real historical events associated with the charges and how the charges and the history relate.

There must be dozens of analyses that are simply dismissive: you know, the revolution was just because Americans didn't like paying taxes for their benefits, the ingrates. (If you want a rebuttal of that new discovery, which seems right now to be fashionable in schools, you might not do better than to look up the one written during the Revolution by an anonymous author who turned out to be Thomas Jefferson.) And the Patriots would be glad to provide some, when they find someone who can read eighteenth-century English, but of course it will be nationalist garbage -- though maybe they won't want to write anything when it requires them to take on that item about slavery: too uncomfortable a topic. Does anybody know of a good treatment anywhere?

Meanwhile, we can contemplate the exact meaning of "conquer we must, when our cause it is just", with reference to the many senses of must, and without raising the scorn of some eight-year-old cynic, as one school did in the Korean War, by replacing "when" with "for".